Azari Pvt Sec Det
BUSINESS
Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Were Hacked, Prosecutors Say
Private documents stolen during an extensive scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into the oil giant’s knowledge of climate change, prosecutors say.
Erin Mulvaney
:{October 12, 2023
Appeared in the Oct 13, 2023 , print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'
:{federal prosecutors said private documents stolen during an extensive hacking-for-hire scheme appear to have been used to undermine investigations into:{Exxon Mobil’s knowledge of climate change.}:
The documents, taken from people involved in climate change advocacy, were among the intelligence collected as part of a five-year hacking campaign targeting thousands of individual victims and companies, according to sentencing documents filed Thursday by the Justice Department.
An Israeli private detective, Aviram Azari, who prosecutors say played a critical role, pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in the conspiracy. He is due to face sentencing in a New York federal court next week.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office says clients hired Azari to manage various projects that were characterized as intelligence gathering, but were instead hacking efforts, stealing user credentials through spear-phishing messages that appeared to targets to have come from a trusted source. They say Azari was paid $4.8 million between November 2014 and September 2019 for his role in the scheme.
Prosecutors didn’t accuse anyone of hiring Azari in the court filing. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.” His lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Wall Street Journal previously reportedthat hackers hired by Azari had successfully gained access to accounts belonging to environmentalists and others seeking to hold Exxon and other big oil companies accountable for their alleged deceptions about climate change.
“It was intimidating,” Kert Davies, a climate advocate identified by prosecutors as a target of the scheme, said in an interview. He now works for the Center for Climate Integrity, but at the time worked for the Climate Investigations Center, both supporting campaigns to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.
“Exxon is not named as a culprit, but their interests were served by this criminal,” he said.
Exxon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
An Exxon spokeswoman told the Journal in a March statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, Exxon Mobil has done nothing wrong.”
The prosecutors said the scheme successfully hacked at least 100 victims, including a climate scientist involved in “a climate accountability campaign that sought to spotlight the role of major fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil.”
Other victims include individuals and companies critical of the now defunct German payment processor
., Mexican politicians, African government officials, and others, prosecutors said. They say the true volume of individuals and entities, however, have yet to be identified, are likely in the thousands and span the globe.
Hacked documents were stolen from victims that were related to New York and Massachusetts attorneys general’s investigations into Exxon’s knowledge about climate change and subsequently leaked to the press, according to prosecutors.
The state investigations alleged the fossil fuel industry lied about climate change and should be held accountable for their role in it. Dozens of lawsuitsare moving forward in state court against the largest players in the industry, and are supported by some nonprofits linked to the hacking scheme.
Prosecutors say the news articles about hacked documents “appeared designed to undermine the integrity” of the investigations.
The Journal previously reported that the Rockefeller Family Fund was among the targets. The charity, created by heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil, has been involved in the efforts that argue Exxon hid the extent of what it knew about the effects of climate change. The Journal also reported Greenpeace, 350.org and Public Citizen were targets.
According to the court filing, climate scientist Peter Frumhoff’s work email account was successfully hacked and received repeated deceptive emails. He told prosecutors, “the spearphishing campaign had an inevitable chilling effect” on efforts to combat climate change.
Another target was Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, who according to the court filing said a private email from January 2016 was leaked to the press that included an agenda and attendees of a meeting held at the Rockefeller Family Fund office in Manhattan. The email indicated that the meeting was meant to discuss how to sway public opinion against Exxon.
After the meeting was described in a news article, Exxon cited it in its court filings defending itself against lawsuits brought by the attorneys general.
Write to Erin Mulvaney at erin.mulvaney@wsj.com
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Appeared in the October 13, 2023, print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'.
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Exxon’s Climate Opponents Were Infiltrated by Massive Hacking-for-Hire Operation - WSJ
In the midst of perpetrating what federal prosecutors say was a massive corporate hacking campaign, Israeli private detective Aviram Azari in 2017 received welcome news.
A group of hackers in India wrote him to say they had successfully infiltrated the email and social-media accounts of a group of environmental activists campaigning against
“On a happy note I would like to report some success below: Project Name Rainbow,” the hackers wrote in electronic messages that were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The messages included evidence of the successful intrusions, including screenshots of compromised email inboxes.
The messages along with court records reveal new details about the hacking campaign, including that thousands of individuals and companies were targeted and at least some of the attacks resulted in the hackers successfully gaining access to the private accounts of the victims and obtaining their passwords.
Among the targets was the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity created by some of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s forebear Standard Oil. The fund has for years been involved in campaigns arguing that Exxon hid from the public the full extent of what it knew internally about climate change and the role fossil fuels played in causing it.
Exxon has long denied those allegations.
An Exxon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company “has no knowledge of Azari, had no involvement in any hacking activities and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. To be clear, ExxonMobil has done nothing wrong.”
Mr. Azari pleaded guilty in April 2022 to participating in a hacking conspiracy, wire fraud and identity theft. After several delays, his sentencing was set for late March in federal court in New York, but was delayed once more last week at his request.
Federal agents arrested Mr. Azari in 2019 while he was on a family vacation in Florida. Since then, he has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and the mystery has lingered about who Mr. Azari’s clients were.
Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan haven’t accused anyone of hiring Mr. Azari to hack the environmentalists and no one else has been charged publicly in connection with the case. In a court filing last year, prosecutors said his clients “included Israeli, European, and U.S. companies.”
Last year, prosecutors notified some of the activist groups, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, that they were targeted or successfully infiltrated, according to documents viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter.
It couldn’t be determined if the fund was successfully hacked. The hackers were able to access accounts belonging to employees of other groups that have also campaigned against Exxon, including Greenpeace, Public Citizen and 350.org, among others, according to the documents.
Mr. Azari’s attorney, Barry Zone, said his client isn’t cooperating with the investigation. The probe is ongoing, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Ted Wells
“My client accepted responsibility for what he did and he’s sorry for the people who were affected,” Mr. Zone said. “In terms of the level of magnitude of hacking, I consider my client to be a very small player in that realm.”
Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, said he hoped Mr. Azari would disclose who hired him. “This defendant did not decide on his own to follow and target climate advocates in the U.S. from halfway around the world. He was clearly working for corporate actors in this country,” Mr. Wasserman said.
According to court documents, Mr. Azari would provide the Indian hackers with information on the main targets for each hacking project as well as on individuals who were connected to the main targets, such as family, friends or co-workers.
The hackers would then send Mr. Azari periodic updates on their efforts. Through target lists and emails related to successful hacks obtained by investigators, prosecutors say they have determined Mr. Azari targeted thousands of individuals and entities.
In addition to climate-change activists, Mr. Azari also targeted hedge funds and other financial institutions.
:{Mr. Azari has admitted to prosecutors that one of his clients was the now-insolvent German payments company:{Wirecard}:
, according to a person familiar with the case. The Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity group at the University of Toronto, said it found that hackers engaged in sustained targeting of short sellers, journalists and investigators working on topics related to Wirecard. In a previous statement, Wirecard said it “has at no time been in direct or indirect contact with a hacker group from India.”
The government “does not know whether its information is complete,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing. “Indeed, there are likely to be thousands of additional individuals and entities who were targeted during the course of the spearphishing and hacking scheme.”
A common tactic of hackers, spear phishing is the use of phony messages designed to solicit personal information that can then be used to access private accounts.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has focused some of its investigation on how a private email from Jan. 5, 2016, from one of the activists to other members of environmental groups, was eventually posted online, according to people familiar with the matter.
The email was sent to 16 people about a meeting that was to be hosted on Jan. 8, 2016, by the Rockefeller Family Fund to discuss efforts to sway the public that “Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”
The gathering was held as some of the groups were advising the New York attorney general on a lawsuit it later filed against Exxon in 2018 accusing the oil giant of misleading investors about the risks that climate-change regulations posed to its business.
Others who attended the meeting included climate activist and author Bill McKibben, a co-founder of 350.org, and representatives of Greenpeace and Public Citizen.
According to Citizen Lab, all of the email recipients were the target of spear phishing attempts shortly after the January meeting. The hacking attempts were conducted by an Indian company called BellTroX, according to Citizen Lab. BellTroX was also the firm hired by Mr. Azari, people familiar with the matter said.
The meeting was subsequently described in media reports, including in a Journal article in April 2016. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, later published a copy of the private email about the January meeting on its website.
Recipients of the email told the Journal that they believed it was obtained through hacking and that everyone on the email had attested they didn’t share it with a wider audience.
“We were pretty strict on who was joining and what we were sharing,” said Jamie Henn, a co-founder and former communications director for 350.org who received the email and attended the January meeting. “We knew this was explosive material.”
Eliana Johnson, the Washington Free Beacon’s editor in chief, said in an email that the outlet stood by its reporting.
Exxon eventually cited the email on its website as evidence of “a coordinated campaign perpetuated by activist groups with the aim of stigmatizing ExxonMobil.” Exxon’s lawyers have also cited the email in briefings in court cases, arguing it demonstrated improper influence by the campaigners on prosecutors pursuing investigations into Exxon.
In his opening statement in the trial stemming from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit, Exxon lawyer Ted Wells quoted the email and said it was part of a “vilification agenda.”
“They want to talk about how they can get [activist groups] involved to advance that false agenda to try to perpetrate something false,” said Mr. Wells, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, during the 2019 trial, in which a New York state judge cleared Exxon of fraud claims. “It’s almost like the Russians, trying to interfere with the election.”
Mr. Wasserman, the Rockefeller Family Fund director, said Exxon has repeatedly used the email “to develop a convoluted and completely false story about how citizens working together to address climate change are somehow conspirators—a fairytale meant to deflect attention from Exxon’s internal corporate documents about the climate catastrophe they knowingly helped cause. It’s like the arsonists trying to pin blame on the firefighters.”
Exxon called Mr. Wasserman’s statement “completely false.”
Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com
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Appeared in the March 30, 2023, print edition as 'Hackers Infiltrated Exxon Critics'.
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