Hamza Bendelladj’s legal woes in France are not over, ZDNET.fr has just learned. The Paris prosecutor’s office has in fact appealed the acquittal of BX1, the nickname of this famous Algerian hacker, an appeal which concerns all the offenses prosecuted. The prosecution had ten days to request a new trial before the Paris Court of Appeal, the date of which is currently unknown.
Sentenced in the United States in 2016 to fifteen years in prison for his involvement in the banking Trojan horse SpyEye, Hamza Bendelladj is accused by French justice of having launched ransomware attacks from his cell against French organizations with PyLocky, a fairly minimalist ransomware of around 200 lines of code in Python.
Judicial shipwreck
His trial, at the end of August, turned into a disaster for the prosecution. After approximately seven hours of hearing devoted to examining a request for referral, nullities and two priority questions of constitutionality, the case was judged in a few minutes, leading to a spectacular acquittal of the defendant.
While the judges had just started to look into the merits of the case, Hamza Bendelladj, appearing on screen in a green prison outfit, was surprised by an error in the summons to appear. This wrongly mentioned JobCrypter, a piece of malicious software that is unrelated to the procedure.
Hardware error
“The robbery of a Leclerc is not that of a Carrefour”, summarized after the hearing the two lawyers of BX1, Me Raphaël Chiche and Jérémie Nataf. The prosecution admitted a “material error” in the name of the ransomware, while ensuring that this mention was “superfluous”, a way of minimizing the scope of this blunder.
Hamza Bendelladj found himself in the sights of investigators from the anti-cybercrime brigade (BL2C) of the Paris police headquarters at the end of 2018, a few months after the first attacks. The police had successfully focused on the sending server, located in France, of the spam email campaigns, the vector for spreading the ransomware.
Before then refining their investigations through open source research and the discovery of compromising elements, such as these IP addresses located in Forrest City, in the United States, one of the prisons where BX1 was detained. During a first hearing in May 2023 before French justice, the hacker claimed to have “nothing to do” with these computer hacks.