Connection Found Between Attacks Against Brian Krebs, Ars Technica and Mat Honan

Over the weekend, we learned that some irritated hackers launched distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against Brian Krebs’ website, and called a SWAT team on him. After further investigating the incident, the expert has uncovered some interesting things.

After getting in touch with the owner of booter.tw, the service used to launch the DDOS attacks against his site and Ars Technica, Krebs learned that an individual with the online moniker Phobia was the culprit.

From a separate source, Krebs found out that it was indeed the article on ssndob.ru which made the attackers unhappy. It turns out that an Xbox Live gamer team called Team Hype uses ssndob.ru to obtain social security numbers which they utilize to hijack the online personas of Microsoft employees who work on the Xbox Live platform.

This story was confirmed by the YouTube videos posted by Team Hype on their channel.

Phobia, who is a member of Team Hype, became upset with the fact that Krebs exposed the website he was using.

Similar to many hackers, Phobia was “doxed” at some point. The security expert found that the leaked information contained the hacker’s phone number, so he decided to give him a call.

During the call, Krebs remembered that Phobia was the same hacker who supposedly breached the accounts of Wired journalist Mat Honan some months ago.

In his phone conversation with Phobia, who is apparently a 20-year-old named Ryan from Milford Connecticut, Krebs learned that he was indeed the hacker mentioned by Mat Honan after the incident.

When confronted about being part of Team Hype, Ryan said he had no longer been working with them for around 6 months. However, Krebs pointed out that there were videos published by Phobia in February.

At one point, the 20-year-old’s father got on the line to explain that his son was “a good kid.” In the meantime, all the videos published by Phobia were “mysteriously” removed from YouTube.