Pierluigi Paganini
July 23, 2017
The notorious hacker BestBuy, also known as Popopret, pleaded guilty in court on Friday to hijacking more than 900,000 routers from the network of Deutsche Telekom. The 29-year-old man, whom name wasn’t revealed by authorities. used a custom version of the Mirai IoT malware.
Earlier July the popular investigator Brian Krebs announced to have discovered the real BestBuy’s identity. according to the experts, the hacker is the Briton Daniel Kaye.
BestBuy was also known as the author of the GovRAT malware, he offered the source code of the RAT, including a code-signing digital certificate, for nearly 4.5 Bitcoin on the TheRealDeal black market.
German authorities referenced the man as Spiderman which is the name he used to register the domain names that the hacker used as C&C for his botnet.
According to the German website FutureZone.de, Deutsche Telekom estimated that the losses caused by the cyber attack were more than two million euros.
BestBuy targeted the routers in late November 2016 with the intent to recruit them in its botnet that was offered as a DDoS for hire service, but accidentally the malicious code variant he used triggered a DoS condition in the infected devices.
“The hacker admitted in court that he never intended for the routers to cease functioning. He only wanted to silently control them so he can use them as pawns in a DDoS botnet. ” wrote Bleepingcomputer.com.
Early December 2016, the man used another flawed version of Mirai that caused the same widespread problem in UK where more than 100,000 routers went offline. The routers belonged to Kcom, TalkTalk, a UK Postal Office, TalkTalk ISPs.
BestBuy was arrested in late February 2017 by the UK police at the London airport, then he was extradited to Germany to face charges in a German court in Cologne.
On July 21, the hacker BestBuy pleaded guilty, according to German media the man explained that he was hired by a Liberian ISP to carry out DDoS attacks on local competitors.
The hacker said the Liberian ISP paid him $10,000 to hit its competitors.
BestBuy’s sentencing hearing is scheduled July 28, the man faces up to ten years in the jail.
