Tesla Ransomware Hacker Pleads Guilty; Swiss Hacktivist Charged for Fraud

The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday announced updates on two separate cases involving cyberattacks—a Swiss hacktivist and a Russian hacker who planned to plant malware in the Tesla company.

A Swiss hacker who was involved in the intrusion of cloud-based surveillance firm Verkada and exposed camera footage from its customers was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday with conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft.

Till Kottmann (aka “deletescape” and “tillie crimew”), 21, of Lucerne, Switzerland, and his co-conspirators were accused of hacking dozens of companies and government agencies since 2019 by targeting their “git” and other source code repositories and posting the proprietary data of more than 100 entities on a website called git[.]rip, according to the indictment.

Kottmann is alleged to have cloned the source code and other confidential files containing hard-coded administrative credentials and access keys, using them to infiltrate the internal infrastructure of victims further and copy additional records and intellectual property. Additionally, the prosecutors said the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized the domain that was…