Margi Murphy and Brian Platt report:
Canadian authorities have arrested a man suspected of being behind a string of hacks involving as many as 165 customers of Snowflake Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
Following a request from the US, Alexander “Connor” Moucka was taken into custody on a provisional arrest warrant on Oct. 30, according to Canada’s Department of Justice. He is due to appear in court on Tuesday.
The charges against Moucka weren’t immediately available. “As extradition requests are considered confidential state-to-state communications, we cannot comment further on this case,” said Ian McLeod, spokesperson for Canada’s Department of Justice.
However, two people familiar with the hacks, who asked not to be named so they could discuss confidential matters, have identified Moucka as the person behind the Snowflake-related hacks.
Read more at BNN Bloomberg.
Moucka was known online as “Judische” and “Waifu.” 404 Media had some exclusive reporting on him, but they report that they had not heard from in a week:
Messages sent by 404 Media to Judische over the last week have gone undelivered, with 404 Media last speaking to them on October 27. In mid-October, Judsiche told 404 Media they were worried that they would be arrested soon. “I’ve destroyed a lot of evidence and well poisoned the stuff I can’t destroy so when/if it does happen it’s just conspiracy which I can bond out and beat,” they claimed.
Their report is consistent with what DataBreaches has been told recently by someone with knowledge of Judische’s activities. They also told DataBreaches that Moucka was responsible for Snowflake, but that he had been trying to pin it on others. According to this source, Moucka had not been heard from in the past week on Telegram, which is consistent with what 404 Media also reported and the arrest date.
Moucka’s statement to 404 Media about “bonding out and beating” just a conspiracy charge may have been overly optimistic, if DataBreaches’ source was accurate. According to this person, waifu had a history as a “simmer” and wasn’t a very skilled or sophisticated hacker.
“Anyone with minimum or average skill could’ve done the snowflake hack. All it took was leaked credentials in a stealer log with the right privileges to dump all the databases. It was as simple as it sounds,” this source told DataBreaches, adding that waifu also wasn’t very careful and would have his own public channels “where he’d go schizo mass posting disinfo stuff and a lot of retarded shit honestly that made no sense. Troll farming and ragebait.”