German police raided the home of a 19-year-old IT worker on Sunday as part of an investigation into a massive data breach affecting hundreds of German politicians, public broadcasters ARD and rbb reported on Monday.
According to the report, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKI) searched the man's living quarters and household garbage and confiscated technical equipment at his residence in Heilbronn,.
The young man, identified as Jan S., told the ARD show Kontraste that he had been questioned "for several hours" by police. He is being treated as a witness in the case. He says that he knows the hacker known as "Orbit," but that it is not him.
On Friday, Germany's Federal Office for IT Safety (BSI) revealed it was investigating the leaking of data about several politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, published on Twitter. The data included mobile phone numbers, contact info, and credit card details from members of Germany's major parties, as well as some celebrities and journalists.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer was to meet with the BKI and the BSI later on Monday to discuss the case, not least contradictory information from the BSI on precisely when it became aware of the case, with an early warning in December mistakenly written off as a one-off.
Longtime correspondence
The young man, who works in the IT sector, has also been sharing some information on the case on his own Twitter account, acknowledging that he had been in contact with the hacker responsible for the data theft. According to him, the hacker contacted him shortly after the hacked data was published online announcing plans to destroy his computer.
On Sunday evening, Jan S. posted a screenshot of an email between from "0rbit," the presumed hacker, saying he was going to destroy his technical equipment. The 19-year-old went on to say that the hacker deleted his account with the Telegram messenger service, which the two had used for years to have encrypted conversations.
The teenager had been suspected of being "0rbit" himself, a claim which he has denied.
