Behind the Blog: Political Perspectives and Platforms

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk about data storage, political perspectives and platforms.

JOSEPH: At the start of the week I quickly wrote up Here’s the Indictment Against the Alleged Snowflake and AT&T Hacker. There is sometimes value in just getting a document out there. We did that back with the Epstein documents, and published them so people had an easy way to find and download them themselves without having to navigate the U.S. court system. That, and I’ve really done all I’m interested in saying about the Snowflake hacker for a minute (mostly after The Walls Are Closing in on the Snowflake Hacker). But I thought I’d go through the indictment a bit more and pull out some sections to add some context.

One part says Moucka and Binns got access to “billions of sensitive customer records, including individuals’ non-content call and text history records.” Court records rarely name victim companies, but this is referring to the AT&T breach. “Drug Enforcement Agency (‘DEA’) registration numbers,” refers to the breach I covered at Bausch Health, where Judsiche (one of the handles allegedly used by Moucka) wanted to extort the DEA with that stolen information. The indictment also mentions financial information, payroll records, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, and Social Security numbers. 

It says the hackers extorted at least 36 bitcoin, worth around $2.5 million at the time of payment. Judische previously told me he made around $2 million.

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