Hacker used to 'take down' a country's Internet

Daniel Kaye, better known as Spdrman, caused part of Liberia's network to be disconnected for a few days in 2016.

On October 26, Kaye, 34, a British national, was accused by the US Department of Justice of being involved in The Real Deal, a dark web that sells hacking tools and stolen login credentials. Kayne was arrested for providing a variety of illegal services, such as methods and software capable of infiltrating US federal agencies.

Illustration of Bloomberg 's Daniel Kaye .

First appeared in 2015, The Real Deal is an underground market of hackers in buying and selling weapons, drugs, hacking tools, user information... with Bitcoin payment method. The most famous of which was the sale of 117 million LinkedIn and MySpace accounts in 2016.

The website went down at the end of 2016, but Kaye is said to have run The Real Deal from 2015-2017 with a series of nicknames such as "Spdrman", "Bestbuy", "UserL0ser", "David Cohen" or "Dlinch" Kravitz". At that time, this person used many sophisticated camouflage methods to infiltrate many top secret systems of NASA, the US Navy, the US Postal Service and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The hacker is also believed to be involved in the sale of Americans' social security numbers along with a hacker nicknamed "thedarkoverlord".

Causing a country to wobble

Kaye is best known for attacking Liberian networks. In October 2016, the system of Lonestar Cell MTN, Liberia's major mobile operator, was suddenly overloaded. Internet access for 1.5 million customers, or 35% of Liberia's population at the time, began to slow down and be completely disrupted.

Lonestar Cell MTN was attacked through a form of denial of service DDoS. With this method, hundreds of thousands of virtual machines (botnets) simultaneously connect to a single point, causing network congestion. This form is not new, but is considered effective so far.

Usually, a DDoS attack will disrupt the service for a few minutes, up to several hours. However, the attack lasted for several days.

In 2016, most Liberians switched to mobile phones. As a result, the disruption caused nearly half of the population here to be cut off from banking transactions, farmers unable to check crop prices, and students unable to access the Internet. In the capital, Monrovia, the networks of major hospitals had to go offline for a week. Infectious disease experts lost touch with international health authorities amid the raging Ebola outbreak.

More than a week, hundreds of thousands of people are still unable to connect to the Internet. Eugene Nagbe, Liberia's Minister of Information, went on French radio to call for help.

About a month later, the attacks redirected to the Deutsche Telekom AG network in Germany. This carrier then discovered a huge botnet, mainly security cameras, routers and other network devices with lax security.

Without finding the mastermind, the botnet continued to take down the websites of the Bank of England and the UK's National Crime Agency. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) then stepped in. A team of experts from the UK, US and Germany identified a user's name, followed by an email address leading to a Skype account and Facebook page belonging to a Daniel Kaye.

In February 2017, while checking in for a flight to Cyprus at London's Luton Airport, Kaye was arrested by police. When searching, this person was keeping $10,000 and a neat luggage bag. Kaye was later identified as a freelance hacker, not affiliated with any government organization or agency. He received a suspended sentence of 32 months in prison.

In 2019, Kaye was again arrested in London, indicted for fraud in access devices and conspiracy to launder money, in connection with The Real Deal. On October 26, this hacker was extradited to the US to prepare for trial.

Confident childhood

As a child, there was no indication that Kaye would become a notorious hacker. Born in London, he moved to Israel with his mother at the age of 6, when his parents divorced. In the suburbs outside Tel Aviv, Kaye studied Hebrew and played basketball and football, before being diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 14.

Self-deprecating illness while imperfect appearance, Kaye rarely communicates. With the computer that his mother bought, he then discovered the wide world on the Internet, by teaching himself to code, researching any programming material he liked, appearing on online forums where the Young people in Israel show off their achievements in cyber attacks.

In 2002, Kaye graduated from high school but decided not to go to college but instead switched to freelance programming. Initially, his target was a white hat hacker - who specializes in finding security flaws and reporting to companies with vulnerable systems.

Kaye then applied for a job with a large American cybersecurity company with offices in Israel. Despite his extensive knowledge of programming, he was rejected due to his bad looks. This is also when he reached out to cybercriminals on the dark web. After a period of exposure to the underworld, Kaye began to create a position of her own. This hacker communicates more widely, getting more "contracts" to attack the network, including large organizations. To serve her purpose, Kaye creates a large botnet that can handle about 500 GB of data per second, leaving targets with no chance of defense.

After her arrest, Kaye admitted to having lost control of her botnet. Before targeting Lonestar Cell MTN's network, many other targets were defeated, including the Minecraft game server .

Earning millions of dollars from cyber attacks, Kaye decided to go to Cyprus - where the law was not restricted, but before he arrived, he was arrested.