Professors: TinKode Is an Ace in Security, but Flunked IT Basics

As promised, we return with more information on the story of the famous grey hat hacker TinKode, who is apparently a 20-year old student that didn’t spend too much time in class and even failed IT Fundamentals, the only exam he attended.

According to a statement of the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), Cernaianu is accused of accessing without authorization the computer systems belonging to the United States military, NASA, the US government, and the Pentagon, with the purpose of obtaining sensitive data.

The same reports reveal that the hacker even developed a program that he commercialized on his personal blog, a site where he posted videos of his accomplishments.

DIICOT is currently collaborating with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and NASA representatives trying to determine the damages caused by the hacker.

Even though the initial report didn't mention anything, TinKode published information obtained from the servers of the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2011, including email addresses and passwords used by employees to log on to their systems, a cybercrime which may turn against him.

ESA stated at the time that the breach mainly affected their mail servers utilized to communicate with partner organizations.

When it comes to his life as a first year student at a Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, his professors say that they haven’t seen him much in class, but they admit that his level of knowledge related to IT security is far more advanced than what schools usually teach.

He only attended one of the three exams he was supposed to and he flunked that one.

TinKode always considered himself a security expert that hacked into websites just to prove they were unsecure, but his arrest proves that this motive doesn’t fly with authorities which didn’t hesitate to bring him in once they determined that his actions were out of line.