The Public Prosecution Service within the Netherlands [Dutch: Openbaar Ministerie] has simply launched details about an unnamed suspect arrested again in December 2022 for allegedly stealing and promoting private knowledge about tens of tens of millions of individuals.
The victims are mentioned to reside in international locations as far aside as Austria, China, Columbia, the Netherlands itself, Thailand and the UK.
Apparently, the courts have taken a strict strategy to this case, successfully preserving the arrest secret from late 2022 till now, and never permitting the suspect out on bail.
In keeping with the Ministry’s report, a court docket order about custody was made in early December 2022, when the authorities got permission to maintain the suspect locked up for an extra 90 days, that means that they’ll maintain him till a minimum of March 2023 as work on his case continues.
The suspect is being investigated for a number of offences: possessing or publishing “private” knowledge, possessing phishing software program and hacking instruments, laptop hacking, and cash laundering.
The prosecutors declare that he laundered near half-a-million Euros’ price of cryptocurrency throughout 2022, so we’re assuming that the court docket thought of him a flight threat, determined that if launched he would possibly be capable to destroy proof and, presumably, thought that he would possibly attempt to warn others within the cybercrime boards the place he’d been lively to begin masking their tracks, too.
Governmental breach?
Intriguingly, the investigation was triggered by the looks on a cybercrime discussion board of a multi-million report stash of private knowledge regarding Austrian residents.
These knowledge data, it appears, turned out to have a standard supply: the corporate chargeable for accumulating radio and TV licence charges in Austria.
Austrian cops apparently went undercover to purchase up a replica of the stolen knowledge for themselves, and within the technique of doing so (their investigative strategies, unsurprisingly, weren’t revealed) recognized an IP quantity that was one way or the other linked to the username they’d handled on the darkish internet.
That IP quantity led to Amsterdam within the Netherlands, the place the Dutch police took the investigation additional.
Because the Dutch Ministry writes:
The staff has robust indications that the suspect was working underneath that consumer title and that he had, for a very long time, been providing private private knowledge – together with affected person knowledge from medical data – on the discussion board for fee underneath that title. […]
With the theft of enormous quantities of digital knowledge, combining totally different databases and buying and selling entry to this knowledge, increasingly criminals know the place an individual lives, performs financial institution transactions, what automotive they’ve, what their password is, what telephone numbers they’ve, the place they work, go to highschool and many others. The place it was once obligatory to watch folks for weeks to establish the proper sufferer, now a push of a button suffices.
What subsequent?
We’ll let you realize if and after we study extra about this case.
We all know for certain that the Dutch police and prosecutors aren’t going to lose curiosity, as a result of the Ministry concludes its annoucement with these phrases:
This sort of legal exercise not solely grossly violates the privateness of tens of millions of individuals but additionally causes monetary injury to people and companies. Police and prosecutors are dedicated to combating this complicated type of crime by detecting and prosecuting cybercriminals.
However we will’t assist questioning whether or not the Austrian radio and TV licence price assortment firm would possibly appeal to the curiosity of investigators of various kind, this time from the Austrian knowledge safety regulators reasonably than the police.
Though firms that endure breaches are undeniably cybercrime victims themselves, they generally find yourself in authorized bother of their very own if the regulator varieties the opinion that they may and may have achieved extra to guard their clients.
In any case, because the Dutch prosecutors level out, it’s the people whose knowledge truly will get stolen who’re the first victims right here.
