First Heartbleed hacker arrested in Canada
A Canadian teenager has become the first hacker to be arrested in relation to exploiting network vulnerabilities opened up by the so-called Heartbleed Bug after he was caught stealing 900 social insurance numbers from the Canadian Revenue Agency.
The 19 year-old was picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after the incident, who said in a statement: “It is believed that [Mr] Solis-Reyes was able to extract private information held by CRA by exploiting the vulnerability known as the Heartbleed bug.”
Solis-Reyes has been charged with ‘unauthorised use of a computer’ and ‘mischief in relation to data’ and will appear in court on 17 July.
Heartbleed was first identified last week by Google and Codenomicon who independently identified a software flaw which in a cryptography system designed to keep data transmissions private.