hacker blk hat

belated, refers to black hats, see anonymous

privacy?

see data breech

---

desmog

An Israeli private investigator wanted by U.S. authorities for allegedly carrying out a hack-and-leak operation commissioned on behalf of ExxonMobil is fighting against his extradition to a Brooklyn, NY, detention center.

During a packed hearing last week at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court attended by DeSmog, lawyers for Amit Forlit used a legal strategy that one climate accountability advocate is referring to as “bizarre.”

The defense is arguing that Forlit, who is accused of being hired by the Washington D.C.-based public relations and lobbying firm DCI Group to illegally hack into the emails of environmental activists and others involved with climate change litigation against Exxon, shouldn’t be extradited on the grounds that the charges against him are politically motivated.

Last Wednesday was the first time Exxon and DCI were officially named in connection with the allegations – part of the defense’s claim that Forlit is “a form of collateral damage” in the legal pursuit of ExxonMobil.

To support his case, Forlit’s lawyers sought to present evidence from “expert” witness Scott Walter, president of a conservative U.S. think tank called the Capital Research Center (CRC) that for years publicly argued that the science of climate change is faulty and uncertain – including publishing a post last year disputing that “climate change” is “settled science.”

In his affidavit, Walter claimed that current efforts to hold ExxonMobil accountable in court for lying to the public about the dangers of climate change are at their core a political project connected to the U.S. Democratic Party.

Forlit is facing up to 45 years in prison for allegedly carrying out cyberattacks and hacking against groups and individuals involved with efforts to file lawsuits against ExxonMobil for misleading the public over the impact of burning fossil fuels on the earth’s climate, and spearheading public communications efforts to undermine the science.

Drawing on Walter’s affidavit, Forlit’s UK-based lawyer Rachel Scott stated in court, “we submit that these lawsuits are politically motivated.”

“It’s a bizarre strategy,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center of Climate Integrity, which has been involved with climate litigation. “Trying to claim that this guy is facing political persecution when, in fact, he was allegedly paid large sums of money to execute a massive hacking operation aimed at hundreds of employees at environmental nonprofit organizations and even those people’s spouses and kids.” Davies was one of the 128 individuals targeted by the hackers.

‘Opinion presented as fact’

On a grey January day, journalists packed into the London courtroom gallery where prosecutors representing the U.S. Department of Justice argued that Forlit should be extradited to New York. Upon his extradition, Forlit faces a federal indictment charging him “with three offences consisting of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and wire fraud,” according to prosecution documents. “The maximum sentences are five, 20, and 20 years’ imprisonment, respectively.” The indictment has not been made public.

Wearing casual trousers and a blue shirt, Forlit watched from the side of the courtroom as lawyers argued about the political implications of his case. Acting on behalf of U.S. authorities, lawyer Adam Payter, with the firm 6KBW, took aim at the affidavit from CRC’s Walter, calling it “opinion presented as fact” and arguing that it was “inadmissible” as evidence.

Payter presented written material from the CRC’s website claiming that “environmentalist groups” and others are attempting to “undermine Americans’ freedoms.” The lawyer pointed out that CRC has on multiple occasions professed skepticism about human-caused climate change and advocated against solutions to the crisis by publishing a newsletter titled “Green Watch,” which outlines these positions. Payter then informed the court that, according to publicly available filings, Walter’s group has previously received funding from ExxonMobil – a conflict of interest Walter did not disclose in his affidavit.

In a blow to Forlit’s defense, District Judge John McGarva ruled that Walter’s affidavit could not be admitted as evidence.

Contrary to the defense’s claims that the charges against Forlit are politically motivated, Forlit “has been sought to be prosecuted for straight-forward criminal allegations that he orchestrated the hacking of persons for money,” the prosecution argued in a legal document submitted to the court.

“That Forlit, as the alleged orchestrator of a hacking scheme designed to politicise Climate Change Litigation,” should claim that he cannot be extradited and prosecuted because this Climate Change Litigation is politicised, “may be thought ironic,” stated Payter in a written submission to the court.

While the judge dismissed Walter’s statement, he agreed to consider supplementary reports and other material provided by Walter. This supplementary material included a report by Christopher Horner a former senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), another group whose representatives have historically expressed climate skeptic viewpoints. According to publicly available data, CEI received at least $2.1 million in funding from ExxonMobil between 1997 and 2006. In 2018, when CEI published Horner’s report, five of CEI’s eleven board members had links to groups funded by present or historic players in the fossil fuel industry.

In court, Payter stated that he would like to add further context on CEI on the final day of the hearing scheduled next month.

Paid $16 million

The allegations against Forlit come from a Department of Justice investigation started in 2018. According to federal investigators, Forlit was the leader of several Israeli-based intelligence-gathering firms that specialized in “offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, including computer intrusions.”

In a court filing, Payter alleged that Forlit’s firms were paid $16 million between 2013 and 2018 by a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, which, in turn, was acting on behalf of one of the world’s biggest oil companies, a company based in Irving, Texas, that wanted to undermine groups connected to climate litigation.

Scott, the lawyer representing Forlit, filed papers that named the names that Payter, the U.S.government’s lawyer, did not; she wrote that the hacking effort “is alleged to have been commissioned by DCI Group, a lobbying firm representing ExxonMobil…”

Some of the specific hacking initiatives were led by another Israeli private investigator named Aviram Azari, who oversaw hackers in India who in turn illegally accessed the electronic accounts of environmental campaigners. Azari was arrested in 2019, and sentencedto 80 months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to computer hacking, identity theft, and wire fraud. (Azari’s sentence incorporated lengthy time in pre-sentence custody, and on January 3, he was released from prison and briefly transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after which he was sent to Israel.)

IFrame Content

Prosecutors contend that DCI provided the hacked documents to Exxon and selected media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Exxon has used the allegedly stolen materials – which include a proposed legal strategy against the company – in its defense against ongoing climate litigation in Hawaii.

Both ExxonMobil and DCI have previously stated that they were not involved in the hacking operation.

Forlit was arrested in April 2024 under an Interpol Red Notice at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was attempting to board a flight to Israel. He was released on bail, forced to surrender his passport and make a security payment of £200,000 ($257,370).

The allegations in this case suggest oil and gas producers are willing to go to extreme lengths to discredit their environmental opponents, explained Robert Brulle,visiting research professor of environment and society at Brown University.

“The climate change countermovement is a sophisticated effort, involving multiple organizations engaging in a wide variety of strategies to obstruct climate mitigation efforts and to maintain business as usual,” he wrote in an email to DeSmog. “Climate litigation represents a threat to the business model of fossil fuel corporations, and so opposition to it is a core part of their efforts.”

The hearing will continue in early February.

*Rebecca John is a research fellow at the Climate Investigations Center founded by Kert Davies, who is mentioned in this story.

---

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 07:07 pm ET

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

Wirecard A.G

., 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

87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the October 13, 2023, print edition as 'Climate Advocates Fighting Exxon Hacked'.

ref

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.

:{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

Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8}:

Appeared in the March 30, 2023, print edition as 'Hackers Infiltrated Exxon Critics'.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/vote-for-trump-or-else-florida-voters-receive-threatening-emails-linked-to-overseas-servers/

Dozens of Florida voters and others residing in heavily-Democratic counties across several states have received threatening emails warning them to vote for President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election or suffer consequences.

Ahead of early voting, Democratic voters in Alachua County, Fla., began receiving the disturbing emails. Voters in Alaska and Arizona also reported receiving the same message.

The subject line for the email reads: "Vote for Trump or else!"

Targeting voters registered as Democrats, the email message opens with a disturbing statement telling potential voters all of their personal information has been exposed as the sender claims to have infiltrated the "entire voting infrastructure."

The sender also warned Democrats to vote for Trump or they would "come after" them. Voters are also being told to change their political party affiliation so it can serve as confirmation of agreement to the terms of the threat.

"We are in possession of all your information (email, address, telephone… everything)," the message stated. "You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you."

Although initial investigative findings suggest the emails were sent from the right-wing group The Proud Boys' official email address "info@officialproudboys.com," a review of the source code embedded in seven of the emails suggests the messages were sent from an overseas server linked to "IP addresses linked to servers located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Estonia," according to CBS News.

However, Dmitri Alperovitch, former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, explained why the IP addresses do not necessarily reveal the exact location the emails were sent from. He also weighed in on the verbiage in the email.

"It could be that they are simply relaying through this infrastructure," Alperovitch told CBS News in an email. "In fact, given how this email was sent, using their web interface, that's most likely the case — that the people behind this found a vulnerable server in Saudi through which they can route lots of emails."

The latest developments come just two weeks before election day.

920

foreign hackers cripple Texas county’s email system — raising election security concerns

Pro Publica September 25, 2020

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Last week, voters and election administrators who…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/russian-state-hackers-are-accused-of-trying-to-infiltrate-bidens-campaign-firm/

a campaign advisory firm that was hired to help elect Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was targeted by suspected Russian state-backed hackers, according to a recent report.

Microsoft Corp. recently alerted the Washington-based firm SKDKnickerbockerthat its staff had been targeted by individuals believed to have been affiliated with Russian hacking networks, according to Reuters. A person familiar with the hacking attempts told the wire agency that “they are well-defended, so there has been no breach.” Microsoft also warned that both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns are being targeted by hackers backed by China, Iran and Russia.

SKDKnickerbocker is a prominent Washington campaign firm whose partner, Anita Dunn, is a senior strategist for Biden’s campaign. It is responsible for efforts like “Vote Safe California,” a $35 million campaign to increase voter turnout in the upcoming presidential election.

A spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the accusations as “nonsense."

"Over the past number of years, there’s been significant evidence documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report and numerous other places, including the 17 intelligence agencies, that Russia infiltrated our elections in the 2016 race and was continuing to do that throughout not only the 2018 elections, but also into the 2020 election,” Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at the government watchdog group Common Cause, told Salon. “And so it’s no surprise at all that this new evidence was revealed recently about their involvement in trying to hack the Biden campaign.”

There is evidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers previously infiltrated prominent Democratic Party officials’ emails amid the 2016 election. While a special counsel report did not charge President Trump himself with actively colluding with the Russian government, the investigation became politicized as a “witch hunt” by Republican Party officials and by the president himself.

Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, feared that this hacking attempt would become similarly politicized. “Politicization in this arena directly undermines our democracy,” Gorman told Salon.

“Given the tactics we saw in 2016, it should come as no surprise that Russia would be interested in targeting a firm tied to a political campaign,” Gorman added. “It’s important to note though that for the foreign actors we worry about in the context of cyber-espionage and organizations relevant to US policymaking, a range of motives may be at play…. For example, we don’t know yet whether these cyber attempts on campaign-related infrastructure are part of a larger election interference plot or simply a means to gather intelligence on prospective future US policy should a particular candidate be elected in November.”

While Russia’s attempts to meddle in US elections in the past four years have caused widespread political outrage and led to investigations such as Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, the United States also has a long history of meddling in other countries’ elections. There were 62 occasions between 1946 and 1989, the height of the Cold War, when America intervened through direct or covert methods (or both) in other countries’ elections. In 1948, for instance, America’s foreign policy apparatus intervenedin Italy’s parliamentary elections to help Rome’s pro-Western government defeat the Popular Front, a leftist alliance of parties. American intelligence officials have freely admitted to influencing or even controlling media outlets, funding candidates and engaging in other electioneering activity in order to thwart politicians who were perceived as pro-Communist or simply not as friendly to perceived American interests.

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules [in 2016] or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Steven L. Hall, a retired CIA intelligence operative, previously told the New York Times in a 2018 interview. Hall said that he “hope[d]” that the United States would “keep doing it,” by which he meant carry out out “election influence operations.”

===

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/breaking-the-law-how-8chan-or-8kun-got-briefly-back-online/

the successor to 8chan, 8kun, made a somewhat brief appearance on the public Internet thanks to what amounts to an attack on the Internet's routing infrastructure. The site's domain name server, hosted by a service called VanwaNet, offered up an Internet address for the site that was from an unallocated set of addresses belonging to the RIPE Network Coordinating Centre, the regional Internet registry authority for Europe and the Middle East. And the host for the new site, the Russian hosting companyMedia Land LLC, advertised a route to that address to the rest of the Internet, allowing visitors to reach the site for a while.

Trying to go “Bulletproof”

After 8chan lost its hosting in August in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting, much of 8chan's content—especially the "pol" channel—had shifted to the social media platform Telegram (known for its anti-censorship policies, which have made it a haven for all flavors of extremism). Telegrampol, for instance, was set up in July. But the fragmented nature of the Telegram channels (and the Telegram architecture) likely kept away many 8chan users; Telegrampol has a total of 633 subscribers.

8kun was an effort to restore a central location for all of 8chan's communities, but it faced the same challenges in hosting that brought down 8chan in the first place—its radioactivity to hosting providers and domain registrars. This is what apparently drove Watkins and company to a rather unusual hosting option: a Russian company known mostly for hosting crimeware.

Media Land is operated by Alexander Volosovyk, known as "Yahlishanda" on criminal underground Internet marketplaces. According to a report by Brian Krebs, Volosovyk is the world's biggest "bulletproof" hosting operator. He has, according to Krebs, avoided takedowns and prosecution by operating carefully within the lines of the law in Russia and other former Soviet states.

Servers hosted by Media Land infrastructure have been tied to the Dridex and Zeus banking trojans in the past, as well as to the command and control networks for other sophisticated malware. Media Land-hosted virtual private servers using legitimately assigned IP addresses have been repeatedly reported for malicious traffic, includinghundreds of brute-force Remote Desktop Protocol login attacks.

Media Land used the fake BGP advertisements for more than just 8kun. According to historical DNS records from SecurityTrails, Media Land had been maintaining an advertisement for a block of addresses starting at 185.254.121.200 for over a month, with the records for 8kun.net addresses popping up about two days ago. The hosts tied to the address block hosted a variety of short-lived malware, phishing, and online pharmacy scam sites, among others, with some dating back to September—all of them hosted by Media Land.

Using this sort of fishy routing advertisement is not an uncommon tactic when trying to prevent potential attackers from gathering intelligence on a site's or network's infrastructure. It means that Whois requests and other network tools return no useful information to casual inquiries. That makes targeting the hosting provider somewhat more difficult. Other blocks of unassigned addresses have been used by Media Land repeatedly over the past three years.

Going dim

The Media Land hosting may have been a temporary move by the operators of 8chan/8kun.The site remains live on Tor as a "hidden service." And the site's domain name service provider VanwaNet has advertised itself in the past as a Cloudflare alternative—giving customers the capability (at some point in the future) to create their own content-delivery networks to fight DDoS attacks.

Ron Watkins, the administrator for 8kun, said in a Twitter post that VanwaTech "has built a fantastic new deepnet CDN that can deliver Tor hidden services at nearly clearnet speed." In addition, the 8kun team has apparently been looking at another Tor-like service called Lokinet, an onion-routing based anonymizing network that is still in development.

Those services may be crucial for the continued operation of the site, considering that the open Internet version of the site was under attack from almost the instant it went live. "We have been under sustained attacks the past few days and doing everything we can to get things stable again," Ron Watkins reported on Twitter earlier today. "The site is still online—albeit limping along—as we reorganize and restructure to deflect attacks coming from many angles."

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-hacker-groups-map/

9/19 andy g

OVER THE LAST half decade or so, Russia's state-sponsored hackers have distinguished themselves as the most active, aggressive, and disruptive teams of online aggressors in the world. They've meddled in elections, blacked out power grids, innovated devious new forms of espionage, hacked the Olympics, and unleashed the most destructive worm in history—a list that makes even China's cyberspies look like tame clerical workers by comparison. Now two cybersecurity firms have created a new visual taxonomy to organize all that digital chaos—and in doing so, perhaps helped crystallize who the distinct players are within the Kremlin's hacking forces.

Two Israeli companies, Check Point and Intezer, today released the results of a broad analysis of code that's been previously attributed to Russian state-sponsored hacking operations. The two firms pulled 2,500 samples from the malware database VirusTotal and used Intezer's automated tools to comb those specimens for code matches or similarities, filtering out false positives like reuse of open source components. The result is a kind of constellation chart for every known Russia state hacking group's tool kit, showing clusters that likely represent independent groups. "The information has previously been really scattered. Now for the first time we have a one-stop shop for Russian APTs," says Yaniv Balmas, Check Point's head of cyber research, using the acronym for "advanced persistent threat," an industry term for sophisticated state hackers. "You can look at this, and it’s all there."

[dynamic graf?]

map's largest clusters of connected nodes show tightly interlinked tools used by familiar Russian hacker groups—from the hackers known as Sandworm (aka Telebots or BlackEnergy), which first rose to notoriety with blackout attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, to the Turla spying team that impressed researchers with tricks like bouncing its command-and-control connections through unwitting satellites. (In some cases, it's worth nothing, different code samples are attributed to a group on the map based on reporting that's not related to code overlaps, such as shared infrastructure—though those links are captured in the map's key, not in its connected dots.)

The map also illustrates a few unexpected—or at least obscure—code connections between Russian hacking teams. It shows, for instance, that the Sandworm group behind BlackEnergy shared code in one instance with another group known as EnergeticBearor Dragonfly, named by Symantec in 2017 as the group responsible for penetrations of US power grid networks—though Check Point and Intezer admit that the matching code, first spotted by McAfee, may have come from a public source rather than actual collaboration.

A tool called X-Agent, used by the Fancy Bear hackers best known for attacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, shared some code with another spy group known as Potao, known for espionage operations against Ukraine and other former Soviet-bloc neighbors. More notable, the map shows that both BlackEnergy and the malware of a group known as Cozy Bear or APT29 used code that came from a credential-stealing tool called LdPinch.

That may come as a surprise, given that BlackEnergy has been pinned on the Russian military intelligence agency known as the **GRU** whereas Cozy Bear has been linked to the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Those two agencies have been known to act independently and even as rivals—such as when they were both discovered**carrying out separate intrusions into the DNC's network in 2016**

https://www.alternet.org/**2020/08/**this-is-what-collusion-looks-like-gop-led-senate-report-far-more-devastating-than-mueller-probe

lots of docs in twt not here

‘This is what collusion looks like’: GOP-led Senate report ‘far more devastating’ than Mueller probe

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 18, 2020

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s final report on its bipartisan Russia investigation revealed even more numerous contacts between President Donald Trump’s advisers and Russian operatives than former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

The committee, which is chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on Tuesday released its fifth and final report, totaling nearly 1,000 pages,following a three-year bipartsian investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The report documents the extent to which Russia sought to influence the election — and members of Trump’s team welcoming their assistance.

“The Senate report — even more extensive than the Mueller investigation — paints a far more devastating picture of Russian intelligence operatives’ access to the Trump campaign, describing far more insidious connections than even Mueller did in his report,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney wrote.

The report, like Mueller’s, did not conclude that Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia, but it found that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with a “Russian intelligence officer” and handed him internal campaign data. The report also suggested that Manafort might also be linked to Russia’s hack of the Clinton campaign.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to theG.R.U.’s hack-and-leakoperation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the committee’s Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The report found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime associate of Manafort, was a “Russian intelligence officer” who might be connected to Russia’s “hack and leak operation.” (Manafort provided internal Trump campaign polling data to Kilimnik.)

While the Senate Russia report mentioned Kilimnik 819 times, the House Republican report did not mention him once. The Senate report also found that Kilimnik later “almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election.” Trump has repeatedly echoed the claim that Ukraine interfered in the election — not Russia.

Another part of the report also cited evidence raising the “possibility of Manafort’s potential connection” to the hack and leak operation, though the evidence was redacted.

The report described Trump’s former campaign chief as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” who worked with Russian operatives before and after the election.

The report also found thatTrump did discuss WikiLeaks with longtime adviser Roger Stone, even though he told Mueller’s team that he did “not recall” doing so. It also revealed that Stone directed an associate to request a leak of hacked emails by Clinton’s top aide when the infamous Access Hollywood tape dropped. The emails were published a half hour after the release.

Like the Mueller report, the Senate report also detailed efforts by Trump and his team to impede the years-long probe.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the committee, urged the public to “review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and reach their own independent conclusions.”

Rubio, however, tried to spin the report as favorable for the president.

“We can say, without any hesitation, that the committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” he said in a statement.

“What the committee did find however is very troubling,” he added. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

But Rubio’s statement brushed over actions by Trump’s advisers, as well as the president’s own statements to investigators.

One part of the report notes that Trump told Mueller in written responses that he did “not recall” discussing WikiLeaks with longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was later convicted in the former special counsel’s probe before being granted clemency by the president.

“Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions,” the report said.

The report also noted that WikiLeaks “likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort” by publishing stolen Democratic emails.

Stone “obtained information indicating” that Clinton campaign chief John Podesta would “be a target of an upcoming release, prior to WikiLeaks releasing Podesta’s emails . . . Stone then communicated his information to Trump,” the report said.

Stone directed an associate to tell WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to “drop the Podesta emails immediately” the day the Trump campaign learned about the looming Access Hollywood tape.

The report also noted that the Senate investigation was met with “unprecedented potential executive privilege claims” from the White House.

“The committee was surprised by these assertions, because they were made inconsistently and because they have no basis in law,” the report said.

“The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the report added.

The report further concluded that Donald Trump Jr. might have obstructed the investigation, but the panel declined to pursue the issue due to “time and resource considerations.”

Trump Jr. participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya about obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Russian government “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known,” the report said.

The report concluded by warning that “what happened to the United States in 2016 should be an alarm bell.”

“Russia is actively interfering again in the 2020 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump, and some of the president’s associates are amplifying those efforts,” the report said. “The Russian intelligence services’ assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process, and Trump and his associates’ participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats” to the homeland.

Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06

The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...

Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/

[long]

...#democracyrip was both the hashtag and the plan. The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate. Events in 2016, of course, veered in the other direction. Yet the hashtag is worth pausing over for a moment, because, though it was never put to its intended use, it remains an apt title for a mission that is still unfolding.

Russia’s interference in the last presidential election is among the most closely studied phenomena in recent American history, having been examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, by investigators working for congressional committees, by teams within Facebook and Twitter, by seemingly every think tank with access to a printing press. It’s possible, however, to mistake a plot point—the manipulation of the 2016 election—for the full sweep of the narrative.

Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.

[From the April 2020 issue: George Packer on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions]

In the week that followed Donald Trump’s election, Russia used its fake accounts on social media to organize a rally in New York City supporting the president-elect—and another rally in New York decrying him. Hackers continued attempting to break into state voting systems; trolls continued to launch social-media campaigns intended to spark racial conflict. Through subsidiaries, the Russian government continued to funnel cash to viral-video channels with names like In the Now and ICYMI, which build audiences with ephemera (“Man Licks Store Shelves in Online Post”), then hit unsuspecting readers with arguments about Syria and the CIA. This winter, the Russians even secured airtime for their overt propaganda outlet Sputnik on three radio stations in Kansas, bringing the network’s drive-time depictions of American hypocrisy to the heartland....

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020....

===

lucky just bitcoin grift

https://theconversation.com/twitter-hack-exposes-broader-threat-to-democracy-and-society-142948

zoom video vul allow apple cams to be turned on remotely 420 covid

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/hackers-are-making-malware-infected-coronavirus-maps-to-harvest-your-personal-information/

mbs

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/saudi-princes-hacking-of-bezoss-phone-raises-serious-questions-about-other-compromised-elites-un-report/

dccc~ dana r

https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/campaign_2018/stories/1060082057

https://www.alternet.org/report-hans-kierstead-campaign-hacked

Cyberattack Successfully Targets a Democratic Opponent of 'Putin's Favorite Congressman': Report

Dr. Hans Kierstead, the third-place finisher in the primary for California's 48th Congressional District, was targeted by hackers.

By Matthew Chapman / AlterNet August 15, 2018, 1:58 PM GMT

A new report from Rolling Stone reveals that Dr. Hans Kierstead, a former candidate in the race for California's 48th Congressional District, was targeted repeatedly by cyberattacks — in a district that is home to the most infamously pro-Putin Congressman in America.

Currently, it is unknown who is behind the attacks. But FBI officials in California and Washington, D.C. are reportedly investigating, and according to Rolling Stone, the campaign is now going public about the incidents:

Kyle Quinn-Quesada, who was Keirstead’s campaign manager, tells Rolling Stone that the campaign is now going public about the attacks for the sake of voter awareness. “It is clear from speaking with campaign professionals around the country that the sustained attacks the Keirstead for Congress campaign faced were not unique but have become the new normal for political campaigns in 2018,” Quinn-Quesada says. He added that the Keirstead campaign did not believe the cyberattacks had an effect on the primary election results.

Kierstead, a stem-cell scientist who runs a biomedical research company, was a prominent candidate in California's "top two" primary earlier this year. He narrowly lost to Harley Rouda, a philanthropist and attorney, and subsequently endorsed him. Rouda will face off in the general election against 30-year GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, is famously friendly to Russia and to the interests of Vladimir Putin, and has been nicknamed "Putin's favorite congressman."He has pleaded for leniency for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has well-documented ties to Russia. He has even been accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Russia.

His Moscow sympathies are so great that even House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy once joked that Rohrabacher is one of only two people Putin pays, the other being Trump.

The American people deserve answers, now more than ever, about any threat to cybersecurity that impacts our elections.

Hackers and Hacks

Julian Assange

Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.

Guccifer 2.0

Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”

DC Leaks

The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.

Trump is already guilty in the Russia scandal—here’s the evidence

RT and Sputnik

In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear

The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.

origin in hacker culture:

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/pwned-meaning-definition-origins-video-games-internet-hackers

COINED

HOW “PWNED” WENT FROM HACKER SLANG TO THE INTERNET’S FAVORITE TAUNT

If you use the internet, you’ve probably been pwned before.

DANNY PAEZ

3.17.2020

SMACK TALK IS AN INESCAPABLE PART OF ANY KIND OF COMPETITIVE ACTIVITY. WHETHER YOU’RE PLAYING PICK-UP BASKETBALL OR SQUADDING UP IN CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE, THERE WILL MOST LIKELY BE SOMEONE TRYING TO GET UNDER YOUR SKIN BY CALLING YOU A NOOB OR WORSE.

But for a long time, the specific type of trash talk used in gamer communities pretty much stayed there. Then, massively popular games like League of Legends and Fortnite made online gaming into a mainstream hundred-billion-dollar industry, dragging those gamer terms into the spotlight, and there’s no word that better embodies how geeky jargon has made it into the mainstream better than “Pwned.”

The gamer slang is a misspelling of “owned” that has come to mean a person being totally and completely dominated by an opponent in any situation. If your trivia team loses by double digits, then you’ve been pwned just as badly as getting zero-to-death comboed in a match of Super Smash Bros.

“'Pwn' is a lot like the sense of 'own,' which means ‘to have power or mastery over (someone),’” the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains. “It has also been used to describe the act of gaining illegal access to something.”

That secondary definition stems from thehacker and programming community that have used the word to describe obtaining unauthorized control of someone else’s computer. It’s a word steeped in internet history, but its origins predate the web and were largely based on misunderstandings and typos that were then adopted as an idiom.

THE ORIGINS OF “PWNED”

The earliest use of the word pwn might come from a game of chess in 1935, decades before the internet was invented.

The match was between Grandmasters Alexander Alekhine and Max Euwe, and rumor has it that Alekhine — who might have had a bit too much to drink — shouted, “I will pawn to your knight” with a heavy Russian accent. Euwe and the spectators present were said to have heard, “Evil pwn you tonight.”

“EVIL PWN YOU TONIGHT.”

There aren’t any audio or written records of this outburst and there’s some evidence that it was a myth. (Chess grandmaster and author Raymond Dennis Keene posted a thread on the Chess Games forum where he claims Euwe told him that Alekhine was sober during their infamous game.) Keene also never mentioned anything about Alekhine's alleged smack talk, which leads me to believe this is more folklore than reality.

But chess would eventually turn pwn into a word used by early programmers.

PWNING AT PROGRAMMING

The advent of digital computing in the 1950s resulted in a generation of programmers who attempted to create a machine that could play chess.

Computer science students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s turned developing the best chess-play program into a friendly competition. A definition on Urban Dictionary claims that these students would call themselves “kings” and others “pawns” when their program bested a competing one.

At this point, pwn allegedly meant to demote or dethrone someone, but the slang was quickly picked up by early computer-users that exchanged messages on FidoNet, a system created in the 1980s for exchanging emails or text on digital bulletin boards. This is where pwn slowly transformed into the insult we know today.

THEN CAME THE HACKERS

By the late ‘80s, only 8.2 households in the U.S. owned a computer, according to the Census Bureau, but many of these users were probably familiar with “pwn,” especially if they were members of the early hacking community.

Members of this online group published a newsletter titled Phrack World News (or PWN, for short), the earliest record of the word being used online. This was around the same time as the rise of leet (l33t) speak, which is essentially Pig Latin for hackers (h4x0r) that wanted to secretly communicate in public message boards.

Pwn didn't necessarily follow the rules of leetspeak, which is a system of modified spelling that replaces certain letters with numbers. The word was also being used interchangeably with “own” by this time to describe gaining administrative control of someone else’s computer. One famous example was the 1997 defacement of theSpice Girls website, which was hacked for several days that November as a statement against the mainstream adoption of the internet.

The pwned Spice Girls website.2600.com]

This apparent misspelling of the word “own” led many to believe that pwn gained popularity because of a common typo since the letter O and P are right next to each other on English QWERTY keyboards.

PWN’S DEBUT INTO THE MAINSTREAM

Leetspeak and hacker jargon seeped into mainstream internet culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That brought slang like n00b and pwn to a new generation of internet users and gamers that used these terms to taunt their opponents after a particularly flashy kill in a first-person shooter or fighting game.

Different spellings, like “pwn3d” began to pop up across the internet, many of which referred to video games but this is around the time when the pwn broke free of its geeky past. One example posted on Urban Dictionary in 2004 uses it as a non-gaming related flex.

Person A: "I spent a long time writing the entire script to Harry Potter.”

Person B: "Yeah, I downloaded it off the internet too."

Person C: "PWN3D!"

That same year a mockumentary web series titled Pure Pwnage was created by a group of Canadian comedians. The series followed the daily life of a self-proclaimed pro gamer. By 2006, hundreds of thousands of people had watched Pure Pwnage on YouTube, cementing its place in video game culture.

Google Trends shows that pwn reached its peak search popularity in mid-2009, which is around the same time that Microsoft warned of a security vulnerability on Windows XP and 2003 that could leave users open to a “browse-and-get-owned” scenario.

Then in 2013, when various web services and sites saw an uptick in personal data breaches, security expert Troy Hunt created the website “Have I Been Pwned?” Anyone can type in an email address into the site to check if their personal data has been compromised in a security breach. As of June 2019, Hunt’s site averaged 150,000 daily visitors, according to a post on his personal blog.

So while pwn might have begun as an obscure programming term, it’s become such a part of internet culture that if you own a PC, console, smartphone, or laptop you’ve probably been PWNED more than once.

COINED is your guide to the language of video games and the people who play them. If you've ever been told to "get rekt" and couldn't tell if it was a compliment or an insult, we're here to explain where terms like that came from, what they mean, and how to use them in everyday conversation.

PREVIOUSLY ON COINED:

How "grinding" came to dominate video game culture

How "camping" became the Call of Duty strategy gamers love to hate

How "Nerf" and "Buff" became the terms gamers can't stop arguing about

How “rekt” went from obscure insult to gaming's trash talk of choice

How “n00b” became the nicest way to be mean online

How “rage quit” became the most relatable gamer emotion