20-year-old German hacker confesses in doxxing case

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/data-leak-20-year-old-german-hacker-confesses-in-doxxing-case/23841212.html

By Grace Dobush
Handelsblatt Today
01/08/2019

When the since-suspended Twitter account started posting an Advent calendar of 
data leaks of hundreds of German politicians and media personalities last 
month, few noticed at first. But after the private profile was made public last 
week and went mainstream, German police were pleasingly efficient in tracking 
down a suspect.

The suspect has German citizenship, no job and lives with his parents in the 
central state of Hesse. At a news conference today, prosecutors and federal 
police said they believe he was working alone and that he had no strong 
political motives or ties to foreign intelligence agencies. What he did have 
was a lot of time and a general frustration with the people he doxxed.

Initial news reports blew up the incident as a "cyberattack on Germany" 
(looking at you, Bild), but this is much more accurately described as doxxing, 
the practice of squirreling out targeted people's personal information and 
posting it on the internet. Some of the leaked data was already public, the 
federal police said, but the perp used "sophisticated" methods to collect the 
rest of it.

The affair has inspired Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to propose a new IT 
security law: Perhaps the Federal Office for IT Security could help identify 
compromised accounts faster or there could be EU-wide certificates to denote 
secure devices. Green Party co-leader Robert Habeck announced he was quitting 
social media altogether.

[...]



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