Romanian hacker believed to be Guccifer, taken to Bucharest for questioning
The Romanian hacker believed to be Guccifer, who allegedly broke into the email accounts for former US secretary of state Colin Powell, was brought by police to the Romanian capital Bucharest for interrogation.
He was taken into custody form his home in Arad, in Western Romania, after the Romanian authorities collaborated with US services in finding him.
The man, by his real name Marcel Lazăr Lehel, in his early 40s, has had repeated sentences for hacking.
He is currently serving a year three year suspended sentence for breaking into the Facebook accounts of several employees of a Romanian media group, and making public some of the contents.
Lehel was taken to the main headquarters of the Direction to Investigate organized Crime and Terrorism – DIICOT.
In a press release, DICOT said there is reasonable suspicion that, during 2013, Lehel repeatedly breached security measures and entered the email accounts of Romanian public individuals, to get confidential data, then changed email passwords, locking the accounts for their rightful users.
He also transferred data from the compromised e-mail accounts into his systems. He then made public some of the information, in order to damage the image of those whose accounts he had broken.
Lehel, who was allegedly using the nicknames Guccifer and Little smoke/Micul Fum, is said to have hacked into the email account of Romania Intelligence Service SRI head George Maior, among others.
He is also believed to have hacked the accounts of actors Steve Martin and Mariel Hemingway, as well as of a former CIA analyst Laura Manning Johnson.
Among the most famous of his actions was hacking the e-mail of former state secretary Colin Powell, and revealing an alleged affair with Romanian MEP Corina Cretu.
Powell denied the affair with the former presidential spokesman.
The 76-year old Powell, who left the State Department in 2005, stayed in touch with the Romanian woman after leaving his post. Guccifer published a few intimate email exchanges, as well as pictures Cretu had sent Powell.
editor@romania-insider.com
