A hacker was attacked by a camera that exposed Verkada’s surveillance camera snafu

Tillie Kottmann, a 21-year-old hacker, was beaten by Swiss authorities and their devices confiscated, Bloomberg reports – days after helping reveal Silicon Valley’s Verkada security venture own the security was so poor that hackers could gain access to more than 150,000 of the company’s cameras to view the inside of schools, prisons, hospitals, police stations and Tesla factories.

According to the raid, it has nothing to do with the raid. Bloomberg, but instead a “alleged cap that took place last year”, and interestingly, a Swiss authority pointed out Bloomberg to the U.S. Department of Justice for further questions. (The DOJ declined to comment.)

It’s not clear what hack the DOJ might be interested in, as Kottmann was constantly shared leaked files from different companies for months, but one remains probable: Kottman leaked a large collection of secret documents and source code from chipmaker Intel last year, and Intel has promised to investigate. Bloomberg according to him, the search warrant was seen, in which it is stated that the FBI investigated the “theft and distribution of information, including source code, confidential documents and internal user data.”

Kottmann has suggested in the past that they have been unfairly targeted for ethical intrusion, especially by Twitter, which has suddenly chosen to enforce its rules on evasion by suspending Kottmann’s account just a few days after the Intel leak in August 2020. Twitter originally suspended Kottmann due to ‘distribution of hacked material’ last June, according to screenshots they shared with me last year, and Twitter confirmed that the second suspension for the violation of the platform manipulation and spam was. policies that prevent users from evading their ban by simply creating a new account. Following the announcement of Verkada, Twitter suspended Kottmann’s most recent report, too.

With leaks like those of Intel, however, Kottmann did not just pass on documents to journalists or make security holes known to companies; they showed anyone the chopped material. While you could argue that it’s also the case that we’re getting a lot of new product leaks, source code hacks are usually taken more seriously.

Either way, this leads some hacktivists to question the decisions of platforms to weaken hackers:

(Hacker donk_enby, above, was the one who scrapped 80 terrifying videos of Parler, videos that were later used extensively to reveal what actually happened during the Capitol Riot, including evidence in Trump’s second indictment.)

This can be a difficult line for platforms to draw. GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, yesterday decided to take down the work of a security researcher who could reflect badly on Microsoft, because the proof-of-concept holes in Microsoft Exchange Server’s code found in the large Hafnium hack has been used. Microsoft’s argument was that the attack was still going on and that the code could still be exploited, which made sense on the face of it.

Kottmann (or at least someone using an account linked to a recently valid Kottmann username, I’m still trying to confirm) declined to comment on the raid and said their previous statements had already led to the Swiss press harass their family. Kottmann tells Bloomberg that their parents’ house was also searched by the Swiss police.

It also appears that Kottmann still has access to a Mastadon account, which is currently warning readers to ‘accept that all previous communications with me have been compromised’ and ‘under US control’.

‘Do not talk to me about illegal activities or crimes. I do not intend to do anything illegal for the near future, ”reads the current peg.

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