The following day, December 7, he… purchased himself a brand new laptop computer, put in a VPN, and hopped proper again on-line. Wagenius evaded scrutiny solely till December 12, when the brand new laptop computer was additionally seized below orders from a army Justice of the Peace decide.
On December 20, Wagenius was arrested and charged with a number of federal crimes, and the feds have since resisted his efforts to get free on bail whereas his case progressed. (Due, partially, to the laptop computer episode talked about above.)
Final week, Wagenius pleaded responsible to a number of of the costs towards him. The paperwork in his case reveal somebody with actual technical expertise however with out a extra normal sense of opsec. The hacked name logs, as an illustration, had been discovered proper on Wagenius’ gadgets. Nevertheless it was all of the methods he saved saying explicitly what he was as much as that actually stood out to me.
As an illustration, there have been quite a few express Telegram chats with conspirators, together with public posts on boards like BreachForums and XSS. (In associated information, the alleged admin of XSS was arrested yesterday in Ukraine.) In a single consultant chat with a “potential co-conspirator,” as an illustration, Wagenius outlined his varied schemes in October 2024:
whats humorous is that if i ever get discovered outi cant get immediately arrestedbecause army lawwhich offers me time to go AWOL
(Narrator voice: “Army legislation didn’t give him time to go AWOL.”)
Then there have been the emails in November 2024, all of them despatched to “an e-mail handle [Wagenius] believed belonged to Nation-1’s army intelligence service in an try to promote stolen info.” These had been all traced again to Wagenius and used as later proof that he shouldn’t be launched on bail.
Lastly, there have been his on-line searches. The federal government contains “only a subset” of those from 2024, together with:
“can hacking be treason”
“the place am i able to defect the u.s authorities army which nation won’t hand me over”
“U.S. army personnel defecting to Russia”
“Embassy of Russia – Washington, D.C.”
None of this exhibits spectacular knowledge/system safety and even a lot forethought; the one actual plan appears to have been: “Do not get caught.” As soon as Wagenius’ gadgets had been seized and searched, the jig was up.
Allison Nixon is chief analysis officer on the investigative agency Unit 221B. She helped expose Wagenius’ identification, and in an article final yr for Krebs on Safety, she shared a message to younger males like Wagenius who “suppose they’ll’t be discovered and arrested.”
“It’s worthwhile to cease doing silly shit and get a lawyer,” she stated.
