A 25-year-old British nationwide named Kai West, believed to be the infamous hacker IntelBroker, has been arrested and charged.
The US Justice Division unsealed prices in opposition to West on Wednesday, saying that he was arrested in February 2025 in France. America desires to have him extradited to face prices of conspiracy to commit pc intrusions, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, accessing a protected pc to acquire data, and wire fraud.
French authorities, which mentioned West was positioned in pre-trial detention, thanked the USA for help in figuring out him and different suspected hackers.
West, who based on US authorities additionally used the alias Kyle Northern, faces as much as 20 years in jail for every of the wire fraud prices, and as much as 5 years for the hacking prices.
IntelBroker is greatest identified for leaking and providing to promote knowledge stolen from the programs of main organizations. The hacker focused corporations resembling HPE, Cisco, Nokia, Ford, AMD, and Zscaler, and even Europol, though in a number of instances his claims turned out to be exaggerated.
The Justice Division mentioned he had focused greater than 40 corporations for knowledge theft between 2023 and 2025, together with a telecom firm, a healthcare supplier and an ISP, from which he stole private and different delicate data.
IntelBroker supplied to promote the stolen recordsdata for greater than $2 million, inflicting damages exceeding $25 million.
An evaluation of IntelBroker’s posts on a cybercrime discussion board — the discussion board has not been named within the indictment but it surely’s probably the infamous BreachForums — confirmed that of the roughly 150 threads providing stolen knowledge on the market or totally free, a minimum of 41 pertained to corporations primarily based in the USA. Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
Investigators linked the IntelBroker moniker to the British nationwide after he bought among the stolen knowledge to undercover regulation enforcement officers.
The indictment reveals that whereas IntelBroker appeared extremely assured in his capability to evade regulation enforcement — at occasions suggesting that he was from Russia or Japanese Europe — he made some vital OPSEC errors.
Investigators managed to hyperlink the cryptocurrency addresses to which undercover officers made funds to on-line accounts registered by West, together with accounts registered underneath Kyle Northern and his private electronic mail accounts.
Investigators additionally tied West to IntelBroker primarily based on the identical IPs getting used on a number of events by each West and IntelBroker. As well as, YouTube movies identified to have been watched by West (primarily based on his IP) have been shortly after posted by IntelBroker on BreachForums.
IntelBroker can also be believed to have acted as an administrator of BreachForums, and French authorities have focused different alleged admins of the cybercrime discussion board as effectively.
French media reported on Wednesday that a number of members of the infamous hacking group named ShinyHunters, a few of which have been additionally concerned within the administration of BreachForums, had been arrested within the nation. The checklist of suspects contains ones identified on-line as ShinyHunters, Hole, Noct and Depressed.
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