A 17-year-old Russian hacker claimed that he targeted a Russian visa center in the United States over the holiday weekend to reveal how weak its systems security is.

The hacker, who goes by the name Kapustkiy on Twitter, said he considers himself a "Grey Hat Hacker," a term that refers to a hacker who does not spill people's personal information to the public. He, however, leaked the information to the center's management to prove his point.

Like Us on Facebook

The breach could affect thousands of US citizens who have applied for Russian visas and those whose personal information such as names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers are stored in the database, Yahoo News reported.

The teenage hacker said he noticed errors in the database's coding language in 2014. He attempted to contact the company then, but "No one did something so I decided to do it."

He said that the company ignored his emails. "I had to do it this way this way to let them understand it," he explained.

Kapustkiy said that he has been hacking since he was 13 and that he could teach a 6-year-old kid to use the kind of tools he utilized to get into the center's database.

The Russian visa center is managed by a contractor called Invista Logistics Services (ILS). The center's lawyer, John Shoreman, clarified on Monday that the website itself was not breached and only the center's calendar was targeted.

"ILS shares a calendar of appointments with the consulate office of the Russian embassy and apparently that's where these 3,000 names came from - it came from a calendar of appointments," Shoreman said.

Tagscybersecurity, cyber espionage