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Alleged Satori botnet hacker indicted by Alaska court
A man in Vancouver, Washington, has been indicted for allegedly being the mastermind behind the Satori botnet, the one reported to be running rampant across “internet of things” devices from 2016 through this year.
Kenneth Currin Schuchman, 20, was indicted last week in an Alaskan federal court on two charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly causing damage to 10 or more computers.
The indictment in late August, as reported by Brian Krebs Sunday, claims that between August through about November 2017, Schuchman “knowingly caused the transmission of a program, information, code, and command, and, as a result of such conduct, intentionally caused damage without authorization to protected computers.”
The possible Satori link comes via a report from The Daily Beast, which claimed that “rival hackers fingered him as the creator of a notorious botnet tearing through routers around the world.”
The evidence trail starts with a report from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. in December that said the person behind Satori went by the name of Nexus Zeta online. Two months later, a post appeared on Pastebin that named Schuchman as Nexus Zeta.
Schuchman, who is autistic and said to live on a disability pension, may have finally come undone by his desire for publicity. Krebs noted that Nexus Zeta — that is, Schuchman — who previously used the name 9gigs_ProxyPipe, contacted him multiple times attempting to get him to write about the Satori botnet. On other occasions, Nexus Zeta posted to a hacking forum.
At one point, it’s alleged, he made those posts without cloaking his IP address, potentially allowing investigators to track him down.
At its peak, the Satori botnet is believed to have infected more than 500,000 routers and later cryptocurrency wallets. Whether Schuchman is responsible for the later attacks is not clear because the code for Satori was released on Pastebin in January, meaning that others may have used it for their own attacks.
Schuchman is set to appear before the Alaska court via a video link for an arraignment hearing on Friday.
Image: Maxpixel
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