Dutch police have confirmed that a 24-year-old Amsterdam man arrested earlier this month was detained as part of an investigation into the ShinyHunters hacking group.
“It is true that this month a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam was arrested in an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters,” the Politie Landelijke Opsporing en Interventies said Monday.
Police said the suspect will appear before the Rotterdam District Court on Tuesday, September 29, when further information will also be released.
The suspect has been identified by KrebsOnSecurity and DataBreaches as Pepijn van der Stap, a Dutch hacker previously known online as “Umbreon.”
Van der Stap was previously arrested in January 2023 and charged with hacking and blackmailing more than a dozen companies in the Netherlands and worldwide.
He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison, with one year suspended, followed by a three-year probationary period with additional conditions.
According to DataBreaches, Van der Stap was arrested again this year on September 15 when a Dutch tactical police unit searched the Amsterdam home he shared with his mother and seized electronic devices.
KrebsOnSecurity reports that sources familiar with the investigation confirmed that authorities were examining a possible connection between Van der Stap and ShinyHunters.
The report also states that the “Umbreon” identity previously used by Van der Stap could link him to ShinyHunters, which recently used the same Pokémon character in a recent FBI breach and the defacement of the Clop ransomware gang’s data leak site.
Van der Stap used the “Umbreon” alias and Pokémon imagery on BreachForums as early as 2021.
However, the same Umbreon character also appeared a year earlier in a 2020 defacement of the HackForums website, a year before Van der Stap created the “Umbreon” account.
Dutch police previously released the voice of a Dutch-speaking man suspected of involvement in the Odido hack.
Police said the man called an Odido help desk employee, posing as a member of the company’s IT department, and tricked the employee into entering credentials and a verification code into a fake login page, giving the attackers access to internal systems.
DataBreaches, which says it has spoken to Van der Stap on multiple occasions, noted that the voice in the recording did not sound like him. A close friend of Van der Stap reportedly reached the same conclusion.
When BleepingComputer asked about Van der Stap’s arrest, a ShinyHunters representative denied any connection to him.
“That individual has no association with us. Frankly, we are laughing,” the threat actor told BleepingComputer.
This is a developing story.
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