US lobbyist’s lawyers explain extent of Doha hacking activity
▶ Elliott Broidy’s legal team identifies 1,200 other targets of ‘Qatar sponsored hackers,’ including UAE officials, in lawsuit papers
Republican lobbyist Elliott Broidy’s lawyers said hundreds of people, including senior UAE officials as well as those from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Syria, were targeted by cybercriminals working for agents of the Qatar government.
Mr Broidy, a major supporter and fund-raiser for President Donald Trump, has accused the Doha government of hacking his accounts, stealing his emails and distributing them to United States media and other outlets, through lobbyists and PR companies it hired.
He first filed his claim, jointly with his wife Robin Rosenzweig, in a Los Angeles federal court in March.
After more than 80 subpoenas and months of forensic analysis, his legal team have now managed to identify as many as 1,200 other people targeted by the same cybercriminals, according to The New York Times.
Mr Broidy’s lawyers allege that Qatar – whose neighbours, including the UAE, severed diplomatic and trade ties more than a year ago over its support of extremist groups – had targeted him for his advocacy against Doha and “strong political views against Qatar’s state-sponsored terrorism and double dealing”, according to statements he made in March.
The list of targets was collected in the course of the lawsuits that Mr Broidy filed, accusing Qatar and several people of conspiring in the cyber attack against him, the newspaper’s report said. A federal judge in California last month dismissed the claim against Qatar on the grounds of sovereign immunity.
Mr Broidy’s lawyers are still pursuing claims against the individual accused.
Mr Broidy, his wife, and other associates all received similar phishing emails trying to trick recipients into clicking a link to a bogus website and typing a password, The New York Times reported.
The links to the websites were always presented in compressed shorthand, provided by the online service TinyURL, and presumably used to mask details of the addresses that might reveal the ruse. Mr Broidy’s lawyers subpoenaed TinyURL, asking what other shortened web links the service had provided to the same user over the previous year.
The response was 11,000 pages of gibberish, Lee Wolosky, a lawyer for Mr Broidy, told The New York Times, so “we knew we were dealing with a serious player”.
Those 11,000 pages contained
Mr Broidy’s legal team say senior officials from the UAE and other Gulf states are among 1,200 targets of cybercriminals linked to Qatari agents
computer code setting up thousands of bogus web pages intended to trap the targets, and the code for each web page contained the email address of its intended victim.
Lawyers for Mr Broidy argued in court filings that the hackers who had stolen his emails almost always hid their location, but at one point they appeared briefly to have operated from a telecoms network in Qatar.
The government of Qatar said it was not responsible.
The emails had appeared in major media outlets in March. They alleged that Mr Broidy tried to influence the president to push his own business interests, as well as promote hawkish US policies against Doha.
They also claim that Mr Broidy worked with George Nader, who is now a witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 US election.
Mr Mueller has gained convictions against several former Trump aides, including his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Mike Flynn.
The inquiry has become a source of increasing frustration for Mr Trump, who has criticised the FBI as being politically motivated and has attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not preventing the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether the president’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere with the election.
Moscow rejects the conclusions of US intelligence agencies that it interfered.