This 17-year-old hacker amassed 150,000 euros in cryptocurrencies by reselling stolen data

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https://cryptoast.fr/hacker-17-ans-amasse-150000-euros-cryptoentreprises-revendant-donnees-volees/

A 17-year-old teenager, living in the south of France, has just officially claimed responsibility for several cyberattacks carried out during this year, including those carried out against the sites of the National Agency for Secure Titles (ANTS) and the mobile telephone operator SFR.

Operations leading to the compromise of nearly 12 million accounts for ANTS and more than 2 million customer files for SFR, including in particular sensitive data such as postal addresses, e-mails and civil status details of the users concerned.

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An illegal activity practiced by the young man for several months - under the pseudonym "NormalLeVrai" - in parallel with his status as an apprentice in the construction industry. But following the arrest of one of his accomplices, he finally decided to confess everything to his father a few days ago, before going to the Gendarmerie to denounce himself.

According to information revealed by France Info, this offense now exposes the teenager to a prison sentence of 7 years, accompanied by a fine of up to 300,000 euros.

Before becoming an apprentice in the construction industry, the teenager followed a high school course on computer security. A subject that he will ultimately abandon following dropping out of school, but which will remain a true passion to the point of then transforming into an addiction.

I got up at 6:30 a.m., did my day's work like everyone else, and then in the evening I came home and spent hours on the computer. It's like a drug actually. You don't realize it, but at first it's a little, and then it becomes addictive.

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A second life which will quickly prove very lucrative, because obviously the young hacker was not content with collecting data on the Internet, he then sold it to the highest bidder on the darkweb, to the point of having finally amassed up to 150,000 euros in cryptocurrencies.

Enough to encourage the teenager to continue his misdeeds, which will sometimes allow him to earn the equivalent of 7,000 euros in a single day, to the point of pushing him to seriously question the need to continue to get up early in the morning to go to work on his construction site.

The opportunity for the France Info journalist to ask what the millions of people who have had their data exposed as a result of his hacks represent for him. A question to which he answers that he “did not realize at the time of the facts”, and that in hindsight this represents “a stupidity of an adolescent which really should not be reproduced”.

Machine-translated from French