A British man pleaded guilty last week in a German court to launching a cyberattack that resulted in more than one million customers of telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom experiencing Internet disruptions.
German media has identified the 29-year-old man as “Peter Parker” and “Spiderman,” online monikers linked to domains used to coordinate some attacks powered by the notorious Mirai malware. He was also identified by Handelsblatt as Daniel K.
A blog post published earlier this month by security blogger Brian Krebs revealed that the suspect is a British man named Daniel Kaye and the hacker known online as “BestBuy.” He has also been tied to the nickname “Popopret,” but it’s unclear if it’s the same person or a partner of BestBuy.
Krebs found links between Kaye, a massive Mirai botnet that enslaved a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and a piece of malware named GovRAT.
Reports of BestBuy’s apprehension surfaced in February when German police announced that a man suspected of carrying out the November 2016 attack on Deutsche Telekom had been arrested by the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) at a London airport based on a warrant issued by authorities in Germany.
According to German media reports, the 29-year-old pleaded guilty on Friday in the Regional Court of Cologne, claiming that he regretted his actions. He said his main motive was money – he was about to marry his fiance and he wanted a good start to married life. It’s worth mentioning that the social media profiles for Daniel Kaye uncovered by Krebs also showed that he had been engaged to be married.
The hacker told the court that Deutsche Telekom was not the main target of his attack. Instead, he used the Mirai malware to hijack routers – including ones belonging to Deutsche Telekom customers – and other types of devices, which he abused to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. He claimed a telecommunications firm in the West African country of Liberia paid him $10,000 to attack a competitor.
At the time of his arrest, German authorities said the suspect faced between 6 months and 10 years in prison. He may be sentenced on July 28.
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