Hacker known for billion dollar hacks arrested, Sanix captured by Ukrainian Secret Service
The hacker known only as Sanix falls to to the Ukrainian Secret Service. The hacker is known for selling hacked user credentials.
The Ukrainian authorities claim that they track the hacker down in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine. In order to protect his identity, the authorities did not release the hacker’s real name.
Sanix is well-known in the hacking community. His operations date back as far as 2018. He is known for selling stolen user credentials in a number of forums.
A data broker at large
Cybersecurity experts brand Sanix as a data broker. His main modus involves hacking user credentials and selling them in various hacking forums. Aside from targeting individual users, data brokers are also known for exploits targeting large companies.
#ukraine security services arrest the #hacker “Sanix”
🔍he posted 773m email addresses & 21m unique passwords on #darkweb
🔍sold CC #’s, stolen #crypto wallets, #paypal accounts, & PINs
🔍2TB of stolen data#CyberSecurity #infosec #malware #hacking #tech https://t.co/emJaPVkVMl— Z3R0👾 (@CryptoWeb9) May 21, 2020
Sanix is known for selling usernames and passwords. His customers are known to be black hat hackers who use these credentials in phishing attacks.
Botnet operators are also known buyers of Sanix’s data. Botnets usually use these user credentials in targeted denial of service attacks.
Aside from various hacking forums, Sanix built his reputation through Telegram channels. He is known for putting together collections of username and password combinations and selling it online. These collections amount to terabytes worth of data and contains billions of user credential.
These credentials are usually sold in private. These user information was later leaked by a fellow data broker after a dispute. The hacker’s archive of data is so massive that it has its own Wikipedia page.
Sanix exploits
Sanix is famous for creating the archive of user data which is simply known as the Collection. It is an archive containing terabytes of email addresses and passwords.
In a statement following the arrest, authorities claim:
“The hacker had at least seven similar databases of stolen and broken passwords, the total amount of which reached almost terabytes. These included personal, including financial, data from residents of the European Union and North America.”
Following the arrest, officials claim that they were able to seize 2TB of data. On top of that, they also found $3000 and 190,000 Ukrainian hryvnias or about $7000 in the hacker’s residence.
The authorities claim that Sanix still hides a number of archives. These archives contain personal and financial information of people in the European Union and North America.
The hacker came into prominence in 2019 following a botched effort to sell a database containing 773 million emails. Also included in the database are at least 21 million unique passwords.
Image courtesy of Markus Spiske/Unsplash
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