A US grand jury indicted on Thursday the Swiss hacker Tillie Kottmann, suspected of orchestrating the hacking of tens of thousands of CCTV cameras in the United States in early March.
Mr. Kottmann, aged 21 and living in Lucerne, has been indicted on charges of “computer intrusion and data and identity theft spanning from 2019 to today,” said in a statement on US Department of Justice (DOJ).
“The theft of identifiers and data and the publication of source codes and patented and sensitive information on the internet are not protected by freedom of expression,” said Tessa M. Gorman, a state prosecutor of Washington “It’s about theft and fraud.”
The name of Tillie Kottmann, also known by the pseudonyms “deletescape” and “tillie crimew”, circulated in the American media after the hack of surveillance cameras of the Californian start-up Verkada installed in Tesla factories, hospitals, prisons, schools and other organizations, then the dissemination of the stolen images on social networks.
In its press release, the American government accuses the young man and his accomplices of having hacked dozens of companies and government organizations and of having published the confidential data of more than 100 entities on the internet.
The DOJ lists several cyberattacks that took place in Washington state, including targeting a military equipment manufacturer in April 2020 as well as an automobile manufacturer and an investment company in January and for which it suspects Mr. Kottmann .
The ministry also indicates that the Swiss authorities conducted a search last Friday at the home of Mr. Kottmann in Lucerne in collaboration with the FBI.
“A cybercriminal can be anywhere in the world. Thanks to our foreign partnerships, international borders do not offer them a safe haven for their illegal activities, ”said Donald Voiret, an FBI agent in Seattle.
According to Bloomberg, who obtained the search warrant, the raid was linked to an FBI investigation into “the hacking of computer databases and the theft and distribution of information, including source codes,” confidential documents and internal user data ”.