Swedish 'Hacker of the Year' Arrested

Over two and a half months after predicting a “free vacation to Guantanamo Bay, paid by Mr Bush”, Dan Egerstad, the Swedish hacker responsible for revealing the passwords of email IDs of high-ranking executives from the National Defence Academy (NDA), Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian embassies in eight countries, was arrested on charges of a “computer break-in”.

Egerstrad was arrested on Monday, November 12.

Other accounts compromised during the incident included those of the embassies of Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Russia, the office of the Dalai Lama, and other governmental agencies from around the world.

In conversation with Biztech2.0, Egerstad reiterated his claim that any confidential data he accessed is long gone and the raid wouldn’t produce anything concrete in terms of confidential data. As for taking the site offline, Egerstad claimed he did it himself as he had other important applications running on that server. “When I heard about the raid, I took it offline so that they would not disrupt the working of the server,” he said.

Describing the arrest as imitating a clichéd Hollywood movie, Egerstad said, “Four policemen from Swedish National Crime accompanied by a policeman from the Swedish Security Police accosted me outside my house, showed me ID cards, and took me in for questioning.” In addition to this, he claimed a bunch of policemen from National Crime raided his apartment and confiscated hard drives, CDs and other computer paraphernalia.

The number of officers and the involvement of the Swedish National Crime indicate that it was a high profile investigation. During my interrogation, the interest of influential foreign parties was mentioned,” he said.

Egerstad seemed surprised by this move as it has come over two and a half months after the incident. “If what I did was criminal, they could have arrested me within an hour of the information being made public,” he said.

He added that the police are being tight-lipped about the investigation. As the investigation is for a computer break-in, and as Egerstad got his data from the Internet using Tor (a software tool that he says is easily available online and thus does not involve any ‘breaking in’), both he and his lawyer are confident about the outcome of the case.

Egerstad said he’s been facing losses in work due to the lack of the information and the hardware that was confiscated in the raid. “I’ve had to redo a major portion of the work over the past two months,” he said.

As far as returning the hardware confiscated during the raid is concerned, Egerstad said the police have no liability to return his equipment. “They could keep it forever.”

An ironic twist to the whole tale was that even as the incident was taking place, Egerstad was featured in the ‘Next IT’ section in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘Hack of the Year’!