14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka Sabu, is not the only hacker used by United States authorities to track down other hackers. Recently surfaced court documents show that at one point, they also relied on the “services” of Thomas Madden, a 26-year-old from Albany who suffers from autism.
Madden was known on the hacking scene as “Eekdacat.” According to The Smoking Gun, he was arrested in June 2011, three weeks after Sabu, for his alleged role in the December 2010 hack attack aimed at Gawker Media.
At the time, hackers of a group called Gnosis leaked source code, passwords and internal conversations between the company’s employees, totaling 500 Mb of information.
The charges against Madden were dismissed in November 2012, but not before investigators used him to track down the hacker known as Kayla, one of the members of the notorious LulzSec hacker group.
Madden boasted in online chat rooms about his role in the Gawker hack. However, he later told investigators that Kayla was actually the one who breached the company’s systems. He was only tasked with decrypting the over 1 million encrypted passwords stolen from Gawker.
While everyone thought Kayla was a teenage girl, he was actually Ryan Ackroyd, a 24-year-old man who served in the British Army before starting his career as a hacker.
Madden was released shortly after his arrest, but he was only allowed to access the Internet from a laptop closely monitored by the FBI. Eekdacat provided investigators with all the information he had on Kayla.
Ackroyd did a pretty good job hiding his tracks. However, on at least three occasions, he omitted to use an anonymization system when sending emails and logging in to his Twitter account, so the FBI managed to obtain his real IP address.
Authorities in Britain were alerted and Ackroyd was arrested in September 2011. He and Jake Davis, aka Topiary, pleaded guilty in April 2013. One month later, Kayla was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Court documents show that the prosecution initially planned on using Madden to testify before a grand jury against other hackers.
The public wasn’t aware of the cooperation between Madden and authorities because the records were kept under seal. Investigators were concerned that other hackers they were targeting might harass Madden if they learned that he was helping them.
Unlike Madden, Monsegur still appears to be cooperating with US authorities. His sentencing has been postponed 7 times so far.