A 26-year-old resident of the Indian state of Karnataka, Shrikrishna Ramesh, testified about his involvement in hacking several Internet services, including the Bitfinex and BTC-e cryptocurrency exchanges.
"Bitfinex was the first major hacking of the bitcoin exchange for me—" local media quoted him as saying– "The exchange was hacked twice; I was the first. I took advantage of a bug in the data center that gave me KVM access to the server. I rebooted the server in GRUB mode, reset the root password, logged in, reset the server password to withdraw funds and transferred the money in bitcoin to my bitcoin wallet."
Bitfinex was first hacked in May 2015, losing 1,500 BTC or about $400,000 at that time. The exchange was also subjected to a hacker attack in August 2016, but the damage then was more significant - 120,000 BTC or $ 72 million at the exchange rate at that time.
"In the second case, it was a common phishing attack, traces of which stretch to two Israeli hackers working for the army who gained access to the computer of one of the employees, which allowed them to log into a cloud account in AWS," Ramesh continued.
In June 2019, the media did report on the arrest of two brothers from Israel on charges of hacking in 2016.
In addition, he claims that he stole $3-3.5 million from the BTC-e exchange and 100 BTC from the Bitclub Network service. By his own admission, he squandered the stolen cryptocurrency to maintain a luxurious lifestyle.
"It was a major financial success for me," he commented on the BTC-e hack.
Ramesh was arrested in November 2020 in a drug case. Subsequently, among other things, he told about the hacking of the public procurement portal, the online game Runescape and poker sites.
"Srikrishna has made many statements. He claims that he hacked the university's website to change students' grades, but the university itself did not report such incidents. We did not try to verify all his claims," the police said.