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Vincenzo "Vinny" Troia is an American cybersecurity researcher who is known for reporting on and identifying members of The Dark Overlord hacker group as well as hacker pompompurin, who was the owner-operator of the website BreachForums and was involved in the 2021 FBI email hacking.

Career

Troia serves as owner and CEO of Night Lion Security, a cyber-security firm based in the US, and founded a threat intelligence firm named Shadowbyte.

In 2018, Troia found a data leak of nearly 340 million detailed records about individual people available on a publicly accessible server of Exactis.

In 2019, he found a data breach in People Data Labs where records of personal data, including email addresses, employers, locations, job titles, names, phone numbers and social media profiles of 1.2 billion people were exposed.

In July 2020, one of Troia's own websites, Data Viper, was hacked. The site contained over 8,200 databases from data breaches.

In August 2020, Troia wrote a report on the underground cybercrime economy built on the stealing of reselling of video game passwords. The white paper outlines the process by which hackers make money by stealing and reselling Fortnite video game cosmetics, some making nearly a million dollars per year.

In November 2021 the founder of the Dark Web data sharing forum BreachForums publicly harassed Troia by emailing 100,000 people from the FBI's servers. Vinny claimed that they had previously performed a DDoS attack one of Troia's websites and also hacked the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's blog to create a fake blog post about him.

Publications

Troia is the author of the book "Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques" (Wiley Books), which illustrates various investigative tools and techniques used to track down and investigate cybercriminals using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering tools and techniques. The book provides a detailed account of Troia's investigation into cyber criminal hacking group The Dark Overlord.

Troia's book provides evidence and analysis to support claims that the masterminds behind The Dark Overlord cybercrime group are two teenagers living in Calgary, Canada. Evidence provided in the book, as well as a subsequent report published by Troia and Night Lion Security, link the members of The Dark Overlord hacking group to other "database focused" hacking groups such as ShinyHunters and GnosticPlayers, along with people such as Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, also known as pompompurin, who owned BreachForums.

Troia's doctoral thesis, "The Cybersecurity Framework as an Effective Information Security Baseline: A Qualitative Exploration" was published in 2018 by Capella University.

References

1. "Hacker breaches security firm in act of revenge". ZDNet.
2. "Exactis said to have exposed 340 million records in massive leak". CNET.
3. "A New Data Leak Reportedly Exposed 230 Million Americans' Personal Information". fortune.com.
4. Reichert, Corinne. "1.2 billion records exposed in unsecured database". www.cnet.com.
5. Newman, Lily Hay. "1.2 Billion Records Found Exposed Online in a Single Server". Wired.com.
6. "Breached Data Indexer 'Data Viper' Hacked – Krebs on Security". 2020-07-13. Retrieved 2024-07-25.
7. "Breach database company DataViper allegedly hacked with billions of records offered for sale". SiliconANGLE. 2020-07-13. Retrieved 2024-07-25.
8. Cimpanu, Catalin (12 July 2020). "Hacker breaches security firm in act of revenge". ZDNet. Retrieved 6 December 2024.
9. Winder, Davey. "Fortnite Hackers Earn $1 Million A Year—Stealing Your Skins". Forbes.
10. "Fortnite Hackers Earn $1 Million A Year—Stealing Your Skins". Forbes. Retrieved 21 April 2023.
11. Vavra, Shannon (2021-11-17). "Wait—The FBI Got Hacked Over a Beef With a Guy Named Vinny?". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2024-07-25.
12. Roth, Emma (2021-11-14). "The FBI's email system was hacked to send out fake cybersecurity warnings". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-07-25.
13. "FBI system hacked to email 'urgent' warning about fake cyberattacks". www.bleepingcomputer.com.
14. "FBI Email Hoaxer ID'ed by the Guy He Allegedly Loves to Torment". threatpost.com. 2021-11-16. Retrieved 2024-07-25.
15. "Book Review of "Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker's Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques"". www.rsaconference.com. 14 February 2021.
16. Troia, Vinny (January 2020). Hunting Cyber Criminals. Wiley. pp. 440–443. ISBN 978-1-119-54099-1. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
17. "The Dark Overlord report: An Investigation Into A Cyber Terrorist Hacking Group". Night Lion Security. 16 July 2020. Retrieved 17 July 2023.
18. Troia, Vincenzo (2018). The Cybersecurity Framework as an Effective Information Security Baseline: A Qualitative Exploration (PhD thesis). Capella University.

• Hackers
• Computer security specialists
• Internet activists
• Living people