2024-01-10 06:06:17
The sentence is heavy, but it could have been much more severe. French hacker Sébastien Raoult, accused by American justice of having been part of a group of computer hackers who siphoned off data from around sixty companies, was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison by a Seattle judge .
The magistrate also ordered him to repay five million dollars for the losses caused to the victim firms, according to a press release from the prosecution. “I understand my mistakes and I want to put this story behind me,” the 22-year-old Frenchman said during his sentencing, according to the press release. “No more hacking. I don’t want to disappoint my family again.”
Arrested in Morocco in May 2022, then extradited eight months later to the United States, this former computer science student initially pleaded not guilty. But in November, he finally made an about-face by reaching a deal with the prosecution.
Sébastien Raoult admitted being guilty of criminal conspiracy to commit computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. In exchange, prosecutors dropped seven other charges against him. The prosecution, which denounces in its press release a young man “whose motive was pure greed”, demanded six years of imprisonment.
They allegedly stole the data of around sixty companies
Originally from Épinal, in eastern France, Sébastien Raoult admitted to being part of the “ShinyHunters”. A group of computer hackers in which he hid behind the pseudonym “Sezyo Kaizen”. Starting in 2020, these hackers stole the confidential data of around sixty companies in order to resell them on the dark web, causing losses estimated at more than six million dollars by American justice.
The group also had two other young French people in its ranks: Abdel-Hakim El-Ahmadi and Gabriel Bildstein, a hacker well known to the French justice system. But France does not extradite its nationals and they have remained in France. Sébastien Raoult was therefore prosecuted alone in this case.
His extradition by Morocco, where he spent months in prison in deplorable conditions after his arrest at Rabat airport, had made his case a diplomatic affair. His family and his French defense tried by all means to have him extradited to France so that he could be tried there, even going so far as to appeal to the UN Human Rights Committee to oppose his delivered to the United States.
“For me, it’s supposed to be a French affair,” Sébastien Raoult told AFP in May from his American prison, expressing his incomprehension at the inaction of Paris, which did not oppose his extradition across the Atlantic. “The American government is just looking for someone to condemn and it fell on me,” he regretted. The only one to be judged, he feared paying in part for “what others have done”.
Blackmail the victims
According to American justice, the “ShinyHunters” used a method of operation well known to computer hackers. They had created websites that looked like the authentication pages of real companies. With phishing emails imitating those from the employer, they lured employees of these organizations to these pages and harvested their credentials.
This allowed them to penetrate the computer systems of these firms, in order to copy their customer files and financial information. Data that they then put up for sale on cybercriminal forums, hidden on the dark web. According to the prosecution, Sébastien Raoult “developed a substantial portion of the phishing code and websites that he and his co-conspirators used” for their scams.
The “ShinyHunters” also blackmailed around twenty victims, demanding a ransom in cryptocurrencies so as not to put the stolen data on sale. One of them reached $425,000, according to court documents.
According to various experts, they targeted the Microsoft account on the computer code sharing platform Github, the Indonesian e-commerce site Tokopedia, the American clothing brand Bonobos and the American telephone operator AT&T.
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