Daniel ‘BestBuy’ Kaye Extradited to the UK— Hacker Charged for Crashing Cyber Infrastructure of British and German Organizations using Millions of Mirai botnets.
Daniel Kaye who used nicknames “BestBuy and Popopret” was accused of carrying out a series of cyber-attacks against high-profile banks in the UK including Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Barclays using the mighty Mirai botnet.
The attacks lasted for two days and occurred in January 2017. Due to the attacks launched by Kaye, banking systems of Lloyds and Barclay’s groups got disrupted causing trouble for a large number of customers. Earlier this year, Kaye was captured from London airport and sent to Germany where he faced trial for his crimes. Now, the British and Israeli citizen Kaye has been extradited to the UK from Germany.
More: The Mirai botnet: what it is, what it has done, and how to find out if you’re part of it
Reportedly, the 29-year-old resident of Egham, Surrey, Kaye, launched DDoS attacks against major financial institutions in the UK by bombarding their systems with a massive amount of fake requests and eventually causing traffic to get blocked. Kaye was able to pull off such a huge feat through the Mirai#14 botnet, which is known for connecting and enslaving at-risk, vulnerable computers and IoT (Internet of things) devices. Mirai then forces dominated computers for sending fake traffic requests.
During the attack, Kaye managed to enslave about 555,000 to 1.5 million computers and used them against the banks to crash over 100,000 routers in the UK. He demanded a ransom of £75,000 in Bitcoin from Lloyds for stopping the incoming traffic, but he didn’t get the ransom because Lloyd Banking Group ‘successfully defended’ the attack, stated a BBC report.
According to previous coverage, Kaye is also the author of GovRAT malware that was used to compromise computers and steal valuable data from multiple US government and federal organizations. He has been around the hacking scene for quite some time but somehow managed to evade law enforcement. However, cyber-security firms got a clue about Kaye’s wrongdoings in November and December last year when he used a botched version of Mirai malware to bring down more than 900,000 routers of Deutsche Telekom in Germany.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) and German BKA carried out investigation and identified the perpetrator of these cyber crimes as Daniel Kaye. He has been charged under the UK Computer Misuse Act and accused of 9 charges under the act, two counts of blackmail and one of owning criminal property.
According to the NCA, Kaye will also be charged for “Endangering human welfare” for carrying out a cyber attack against Lonestar MTN, the largest internet service provider firm in Liberia. A European Arrest Warrant was issued to capture Kaye. He was arrested in February 2017 from London airport and was extradited to Germany immediately to face trial.
Now, he has been sent back to the UK and will remain in police custody until the court hearing, which is due on 28th September. In Germany’s trial, Daniel admitted receiving payment of $10,000 from an unidentified party for attacking the Liberian ISP.