Hacking Around & Yevgeny Nikulin

Almost every hacker these days seems to be accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee, and maybe that is because they all have.  Apparently, the DNC was not that hard to get into.  But, this one is a little different because there may be something to the accusations.  Both the Russians and the Amcricans want this guy.  That alone would make him interesting.

Radio Free Europe (RFE) has the initial story yesterday and the Washington Post Europe and others had it at the same time.  The Post story claims Yevgeny Nikulin told a story of an FBI agent approaching him to testify that he hacked the DNC.  In exchange for this testimony he would get a trip to the U.S, money and presumably anonymity forever, or something like that.  RFE seems to have taken out the politics of this and mentions only that he was wanted for lifting info from LinkedIn and businesses.  The Russians want him for similar things and do not want the US to have him.  So, we know a couple of things.  First this guy has been caught hacking several times since 2009, so he has been around, i.e one of the usual suspects.  Two, we know he was hacking in more than one country, unless of course the Russians found out that he was being investigated and issued an Interpol warrant to keep him from falling into anyone else's hands.  This is the old "my warrant came first trick" in case you had not heard of it.  The Czech court did not seem to buy that and started down a path that will put him in the United States.  There is still a ways to go on that, so we will see how it works out.

His attorney has opted for a political defense.  His client is a pawn in the US persecution of Russia over the interference in the national election.  I guess that doesn't hold up very well on review.  I would like to say that I hacked the DNC, but I didn't and would be hard pressed to qualify since letting my skills go over the years, but a bunch of people out there seemed to be getting blamed for it.  Like I said, either they all did it, or this is just a smoke screen to cover up the fact that they don't know who did.