A Ukrainian national has been extradited to the United States where he is accused of
"hacking"
and
"trafficking in passwords,"
the US Department of Justice said on Wednesday.
Glib Ivanov-Tolpintsev, 28, is suspected of breaking into tens of thousands of computers and selling their access codes on the darknet, the clandestine version of the internet, according to a statement from the ministry.
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Arrested in Poland in October 2020, he was transferred to the United States under an agreement between the two countries and was presented on Tuesday to a federal judge who ordered his continued pre-trial detention pending trial . According to the indictment, from 2016 he had control of a "botnet", a network of computers infected with malware without the knowledge of their owners, and he used it to decrypt their access codes.
In an exchange with an accomplice, he then boasted of being able to steal the identifiers of at least 2000 computers per week.
In 2017, in another conversation, he claimed to have recovered the passwords of more than 20,000 devices.
Once sold, these pass codes were used in criminal activities, including tax fraud or ransomware attacks, according to the Justice Department.
The United States has been hit recently by numerous such attacks, which involve breaking into an entity's networks to encrypt its data and then demanding a ransom in exchange for the decryption key.