19 year-old arrested for attack on Canadian tax agency

A 19 year old London, Ontario man was arrested by the RCMP on Tuesday, in connection to the ongoing investigation of the Canada Revenue Agency data breach.

Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes, 19, was arrested in his home without incident, the RCMP reported in a statement. His lawyer, Faisal Joseph, said that Solis-Reyes turned himself in, after police threatened to arrest him during classes at Western University.

He is charged with one count of Unauthorized Use of Computer and one count of Mischief in Relation to Data. The RCMP said that it is believed that he extracted the compromised taxpayer data from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) by exploiting the Heartbleed bug.

“It is believed that Solis-Reyes was able to extract private information held by the CRA by exploiting the security vulnerability known as the Heartbleed Bug,” the statement said.

The CRA made headlines last week when they closed parts of their website in order to address the Heartbleed vulnerability, which allows an attacker to retrieve data stored in the webserver’s memory in 64kb chunks.

It was during the patching process that the CRA discovered the flaw had already been exploited, and that someone managed to collect the Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) of approximately 900 people.

“Regrettably, the CRA has been notified by the Government of Canada’s lead security agencies of a malicious breach of taxpayer data that occurred over a six-hour period,” Andrew Treusch, Commissioner of the CRA, said in a statement at the time.

“Based on our analysis to date, Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) of approximately 900 taxpayers were removed from CRA systems by someone exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. We are currently going through the painstaking process of analyzing other fragments of data, some that may relate to businesses that were also removed.”

Canadian media are reporting that the RCMP were working on a tip that led them to Solid-Reyes, which is the reason the CRA was asked to withhold public notification of the data breach last Friday.

Solis-Reyes will appear in court July 17.