Phineas Fisher is a funny old thing. What with all the finding Russians under the table stuff and suchlike, it's always flummoxed me as to why Phin has escaped the red, wrathful eye of meanie Putin h8ters crowd.
As far as I can tell, exactly one person in the media has questioned Fisher, and was met with luke warm, almost passive aggressive skepticism. The rest of the natsec reporters either don't care, or haven't really considered it that much.
Hmm. Sometimes I wonder: Could it possibly be because Phin's been scratching all the right people in all the right places, that s/he's escaped such questions? Could it be that simple?
First, a Little Ancient History
Required reading, The Russian Contractor who Infiltrated Anonymous is a brilliant article by Emma Best aka natsecgeek. Read it.
It's kind of hard to produce a tl;dr, but I'll do my best:
Basically, a Russian hacker was caught by the FBI, turned CI, head-fucked around with them, and when he returned home, began another phase of mass political hacks, fake hacks, false-flag operations, and false-false-flag operations.
In the article Emma suggests Popov (the hacker's name) may have been working with the Russians, even though he went out of his way in trying to convince everyone he didn't, and may have been a prototype for Guccifer2.0
There are two small parts Emma missed that would have really really supported the argument even more:
The first is concerns Popov/NKWT's involvement in election meddling hacks of the Italian Democratic Party.
The second is in an archive of the old NKWT blog in which they seem to have taken credit for p0wning 'hackingteam.it'
'The Hacking Team'... Who else do we know who claimed credit for that hack?
Oh yeah, that's right, it was fucking Phineas!
In Phineas' Own Words
I wonder what Phineas has to say about the nature of nation state hax0r groups? Actually, one doesn't have to wonder at all. Not only did Phin talk about APT's, they even went so far as to hint that's their actual fucking dayjob, in an odd little aside in a hacking tutorial written by Fisher.
"In the news we often see attacks attributed to groups of governmental hackers ('APTs'), because they always use the same tools, leave the same footprints, and even use the same infrastructure (domains, emails, etc.). They're negligent because they free to hack without any legal consequences."" ... ""I didn't want to make it too easy for the police to link what I did to Hacking Team, with its hacks and handles, with my day-to-day work as a blackhat hacker. So I used new servers and domains, registered with new email accounts, and payed with new bitcoin. And I only used tools which were either publically available, or which I had written specifically for this attack, and I changed my style of doing things so as to not leave my usual forensic footprint." source
Hacks Galore
Then there was Phineas' Catalan Police Union Hack which kind of weirdly echoes Popov's hacks of yore concerning Italian State Police...
And the seemingly unrelated hacks of the Ukrainian Parliament, the German Freedom Party, and The Illinois State Board of Elections (which the FBI attributed to zi Russians), none of which Phineas claimed credit for, but, well... here's where things get a little awkward.
The Turkish AK Parti Leaks
Remember the AKP hacks/leaks sent to Wikileaks, mid stream, during all those election leaks that have caused so much fuss? During a highly suspect coup that was going on in Turkey at the same time?
Guess who was the mouthpiece?
Phineas Fisher.gif
So what? Fisher was the good guy see? He was working with the Kurds, and the Russians would never dream of using the Kurds as their play things, now would they?
'Member how I mentioned the Ukrainian Parliament, the German Freedom Party, the The Illinois State Board of Elections hack? Well it turns out they had a little something in common with the AKP hacks.. specifically, phishing domains used in the AKP hack shared the very same infrastructure.
That's right. Phineas was running with a group the FBI--as well as threatconnect (who, showed their working)--had fingered as being a certain familiar APT!
SOURCE
The Phoney Turkish Coup
The AKP leaks are especially interesting because they coincided with what many now believe was a dubious coup, which Uncle Putin saved Erdogan from at the last minute.
The registration of the AKP phishing domains far pre-dated the coup attempt (as far back as early January, 2016), yet the actual attacks were initiated slap bang in the middle of the coup, which Wikileaks foolishly thought to capitalize on.
But there's a much more disturbing angle concerning a so called fuckup/miscommunication between the hackers and WL, in which Wikileaks were accused of cramping the hackers style by publishing early and kicking them off the network, and in which the hackers contacted none other than Emma Best, with the rest of the material, which was seeded in the form of torrents and uploaded to Emma's archive.org account. Phineas claims he actually thought there was less reason to worry about dumping everything at once because the coup had failed, even though when you think about it, the opposite would be true: Erdogan was pruning his own tree. Popov and Redhack have been involved in similar situations where a hack looks to be against the Kremlin or the Turkish govt, but could just as easily be in support of internal power struggles/purges.
"Even though I hadn’t had time to go through and see what was in the files, I figured I should leak it right away, as at this point the coup had already been defeated and Erdogan was engaged in full on post-coup crackdown and repression. So it seemed like leaking data taken from AKP’s server would have the potential to help people. Since I’m not a fancy bear, just a normal person that doesn’t understand Turkish, I didn’t know much about the contents of the files and didn’t realise it had AKP’s voter database." - Phineas
It was touted as one of the largest leaking blunders in leaking history (even though the offending dataset had already been leaked in 2010 in a supposedly unrelated incident); exposing the names and addresses of Turkish citizens--which Wikileaks was later blamed for--AFTER A DUBIOUS COUP ATTEMPT BEING USED AS A PRETEXT TO CLEANSE UNDESIRABLES.
And I haven't even gotten into digging up the anti-Gulen so-call Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (what tone-deaf agent provocateur came up with that mix of isms?) redhack hacker group side of things (who I suspect Popov put Hector, and Hammond in contact with, but have no proof for, other than around the same time Popov was feeding targets to Hector, Hector was feeding Turkish redhack targets to hammond) would then release 'Berats Box' to Wikileaks.
On top of all this, you have Flynn on the sidelines working for Trump as an agent of Turkey, pointing the finger at Gulen.
...
People, including myself, have always gone on how Putin is, like, SO OVERRATED, and shit?
Yeah. About that.
DDosSecrets
Best, the author of the brilliant piece of research on Popov, for no reason I can discern, other than possible ongoing contact with Fisher as a source, seems sure that Phineas is not a Russian Guccifer style front.
explodinghead.gif
Trump/Stone aside, it's kind of difficult to decide what Assange knew and when, with regards GRU's involvement in Guccifer2.0. But as for Fisher...
Prooobably poison ivy.
Around April of 2016 Phineas' avatar featured a screenshot from a video of a Russian recording artist, Timati, who participated in a political video to support Putin during 2012 presidential elections as well as the 2018 presidential elections.
I'm not saying it's the Russians, but... LOL