Bulgarian police arrest hacker Instakilla

Bulgarian law enforcement has arrested on Wednesday a local hacker going by the name of Instakilla on accusations of hacking, extorting companies, and selling hacked data online.

Authorities raided two of the hacker's residences in Plovdiv, a city in central Bulgaria, and confiscated several computers, smartphones, flash drives, and cryptocurrency, according to a press release from the Ministry of Interior.

The hacker was identified as a young Bulgarian male. His name was not released to the public, and he is currently detained on a three-day arrest warrant.

Prior to his arrest this week, the hacker has been a staple on the underground hacking scene. He has been active since 2017 but has only recently risen to notoriety.

Although he was not directly involved in the hack of the Bulgarian National Revenue Agency (NRA) in the summer of 2019, Instakilla is one of the hackers who tracked down the database and later offered it for download on a popular hacking forum, helping the data spread across the hacker community.

The hacker also ran a website where he offered hacker-for-hire services.

Prior versions of this website were indexed by the Wayback Machine and included links to a Bulgarian individual's Facebook account. The account, prior to being deleted, belonged to a young male from Plovdiv, when ZDNet reviewed the page last year during our NRA hack story.

Earlier this year, the hacker also took credit for hacking the forum of Stalker, a Russian first-person shooter online game, from where he stole more than 1.2 million user records, which he later put up for sale on a hacking forum.

On the same forum, the hacker also ran a so-called store, where he sold the data of multiple companies, including two Bulgarian entities -- an unnamed local hosting provider and an unnamed email service.

Most of the hacked entities were forums, and based on conversations ZDNet had with the hacker in May, Instakilla appears to have been an avid fan of using vBulletin exploits to target unpatched forums and pilfeer their databases.