This year saw some of the most jaw-dropping cybercrimes and breaches—and the highest-profile arrests—from teenage hackers breaking into Fortune 500 networks to hiding billions of dollars in bitcoin under floorboards. including up to
We consider the cybercrimes we lost to the law in 2022.
WhatsApp Hacking Technology
A Mexican businessman has admitted to selling WhatsApp hacking tools, Wi-Fi interception tools and signal jammers for profit and personal use.
Carlos Guerrero was charged by the Department of Justice with, among other things, arranging the sale of hacking tools to Mexican politicians and using other tools provided to eavesdrop on U.S. adversary phone calls.
UK arrests teenage hackers linked to Uber, GTA hacks
Police in London announced in September that a 17-year-old accused of high-profile breaches at Rockstar Games and ride-hailing giant Uber has been charged with computer misuse and multiple bail breaches.
These two hacks were among the most popular of 2022. Uber was forced to shut down several of its internal tools while it kicked the hacker out of its network because it believed a hacker linked to Lapsus$ was behind the attack.
Uber employees received a message that said, “I hereby announce that I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach,” just before the Slack system shut down. According to reports, the hacker also suggested that Uber drivers should be paid more.
Lapsus$ was finally caught.
In 2022, the Lapsus$ gang gained notoriety. After originally appearing a year ago, the data extortion gang soon claimed a number of well-known victims, including Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung.
The group once appeared to be dormant, but some of its members were detained in March this year. At the time, the City of London Police confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch that seven people, aged between 16 and 21, had been detained in connection with Lapsus$.
One of the largest bank robberies in American history
Paige Thompson, a former engineer in Amazon’s cloud business, was found guilty in 2019 of a breach that exposed the private information and money of 100 million CapitalOne clients.
One of the largest bank robberies in US history, it affected one million Canadians and resulted in credit scores, embargoes and stolen balances. Thompson was accused of hacking into CapitalOne’s online cloud storage, which is hosted on Amazon’s servers.
Prosecutors said the former Amazon engineer was “one bad day away from sharing the data he stole.”
James Zhong, the hacker who stole billions of Silk Road bitcoins
The mystery of the lost billions of the infamous dark web narcotics marketplace Silk Road has been solved with a surprising but grim ending to one of the US government’s longest-running cyber cases.
Authorities claimed in November that they had discovered $3.36 billion worth of bitcoin hidden in a popcorn box under the bathroom cabinet floor of the hacker’s home nearly 10 years ago.
The hacker, a Georgia citizen named James Zhong, agreed to hand over a large sum of bitcoins as well as $600,000 in cash and other precious metals.
