23-year-old Swiss hacker gains access to US no-fly list, including names of 1.5M terror suspects
GENEVA
A Swiss hacker gained access to the US Transportation Security Administration’s no-fly list, according to local media on Monday.
The list, reportedly located on an unsecured computer server, includes the names of around 1.5 million known or suspected terrorists, the Swiss daily Blick said.
Anyone on the US government’s no-fly list is either not allowed to board a plane or must endure drastic checks.
The hacker, 23-year-old Tillie Kottmann from the city of Lucerne in the Swiss canton of the same name is also known with the pseudonym maia arson crimew and already published confidential data of US authorities and companies in numerous cases.
Kottmann, reportedly behind the hack of over 150,000 surveillance cameras belonging to the US company Verkada in March 2021, is currently facing an arrest warrant in the US.
The data leak has caused a stir in the US, with politicians calling for a congressional investigation.
“Aside from the fact that the list is a civil liberties nightmare, it begs the question of how this information was so easily accessible,” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop wrote on Twitter.
According to Bishop, Congress will have to investigate the disclosure of the data.
Kottmann told the news channel Swissinfo that she deliberately overstepped the bounds of the law — to highlight security gaps and make public data that she considers to be of public interest.
She cracked the flight list “out of boredom,” Kottmann also wrote on her blog.
