A few years ago an espionage scandal against some of the most important clubs and institutions in world football was revealed. Known as Football Leaks, this incident was attributed to the alleged Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto, who would have stolen and exposed more than 70 million documents related to contracts, transfer figures and organizational structure of multiple clubs.
Pinto was arrested in Budapest in early 2020 and has since faced trial for more than 90 crimes related to illegal hacking, although problems keep growing for him. According to a recent report, Rui Pinto also carried out a spy campaign on some players of the Spanish soccer club Real Madrid.
After the Football Leaks revelations, the Portuguese authorities started “Operation Offside”, to investigate Jorge Mendes, representative of many of the most important soccer players and coaches in the world.
Local media mention that, during this investigation, it was discovered that Rui Pinto managed to access the computer structure of Real Madrid, finding emails and documents on multiple aspects of the team. All of this information was stored by Pinto on a hard drive confiscated by the authorities at the time of his arrest.
Pinto is still awaiting trial where he will hear the sentence for the 68 charges of improper access to computer equipment, 14 charges for violation of confidential correspondence, six for illegitimate access, one charge for hacking and one more for attempted extortion.
Pinto’s defense continues to try to dismiss the extortion charge, considered the most serious crime of all those committed by the hacker. Pinto allegedly tried to extort money from Doyen Sports, a representation agency, demanding $ 500,000 USD in exchange for not revealing his confidential information.
In addition to these charges, the authorities point to Pinto as the person responsible for the hack into a Cayman Islands bank that caused a loss of 300 thousand euros, although this accusation has not been formally brought to justice.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.