Bulgarian tax office hacker accused of looking for data on the country's prime minister and other VIPs

Police in Bulgaria claim the results of the search were found on the hackers' PC

Police in Bulgaria claim that the alleged hacker of the country's National Revenue Agency was looking at the files of a number of VIPs in the country, including Bulgaria's prime minister, Boyko Borisov.

Other people the authorities claim the hacker, named as Kristiyan Boykov, was interested include MP Delyan Peevski and chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov. However, the claims represent a sharp change from just a week ago when the supposed hacker was arrested. Since then, too, the hacked files have also turned up on the usual data-trading dark-web sites.

"The new version of the prosecution sounds like a spectacular conspiracy - it packs into one hacker, opposition politician, independent of the media, and suspicions that the target of the attack was the most influential people in the state, albeit unclear for what purpose," the local Mediapool newspaper reported.

The prosecutor is now also claiming that the company that employed Boykov was also involved in the conspiracy.

"The Prosecutor's Office is sure that the 20-year-old computer expert Christian Boikov is responsible for the breakthrough in the NRA," claims the report. Prosecutors claim that TAD Group, the company that employed Boikov, is not entirely legitimate. They claim that it carries out cyber hits on organisations to disrupt their IT operations, before riding in to the rescue.

The Prosecutor's Office has added that it has evidence that Boikov was searching in the NRA databases for information about Peevski, Borisov and Tsatsarov, as well as a number of other relatively prominent individuals in Bulgaria.

"In addition, Boykov had stored some of his data on his computer, investigators say. The file was stored under a folder called ‘home math' and contained the names of 106 databases and multiple tables, identical to the partially distributed 57 NRA databases on the Internet," according to prosecutors.

Intriguingly, perhaps, the prosecutors also claim to have been able to decrypt multiple encrypted files on Boykov's PC - despite authorities earlier claiming that the 20-year-old's PC had been locked down in terms of security.

Borisov is currently serving his third separate term as Prime Minister, having promised crackdowns on crime and corruption each time.