How Israeli hacker accessed Ruto’s election strategist’s phone
An Israeli hacker gained access to the phone of a Kenyan election strategist who was working for President William Ruto in the general election of 2022, according to a bombshell exposé by a consortium of journalists from 30 different outlets.
The hacker, Tal Hanan, is the head of a clandestine group of Israeli contractors who claim to have hacked, sabotaged, and automated social media disinformation campaigns to influence more than 30 elections globally.
In the investigation, Hanan was boasting of how sending messages through the messaging app could be used to disrupt a rival’s election campaign.
The reporters involved in the investiagtion conducted a year-long undercover investigation into the group known as “Team Jorge,” meeting with Hanan in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv while posing as political consultants.
Reporters from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker, received documents and recordings that reveal the team’s procedures as well as covertly taped the sessions.
Hanan demonstrated to the reporters how to access his targets’ Gmail and Telegram accounts in one of the films. He claimed to have employed the “spear phishing” method, which entails emailing the recipient a malicious link or attachment, which they subsequently click to unwittingly grant access to their device.
In the course of the investigation, Hanan clearly displayed the Gmail account of a man referred to as the “assistant of an important guy” in the general election in Kenya. He then demonstrated how he allegedly could access accounts on the encrypted messaging software Telegram.
Hanan claims that instead of actually hacking into the phone, they just copy the target’s ID to have access to all of the accounts that are linked to his phone.
One of the Telegram accounts he claimed to have accessed belonged to a person in Indonesia, while the other two belonged to people linked to Ruto, who was a candidate at the time, and active in the general election taking place in Kenya.
Hareetz publication shared that the hackers accessed Dennis Itumbi’s Telegram. Itumbi was the Digital Strategist at the Presidential Campaign of William Ruto.
Itumbi admitted that he noticed increased activity on his account and decided to counter the hack by providing misleading information.
“After noticing the increased activity, we decided to intentionally mislead those who were trying to obtain information illegally,” Itumbi said.
“We staged a communication on agents, saying how unnecessary they were and how costly the exercise was. We even concluded we will pick agents of course in reality we invested our entire time recruiting agents,” he added.
In a video by ZEIN ONLINE, a member in the Team Jorge syndicate showed how they accessed chats and calls to a current Cabinet Secretary and close ally to President Ruto.
The team member through a shared Zoom call displayed a screen on which it appeared that he was scrolling through the Telegram connections to the CS who was then working for Ruto.
Hanan then gave a demonstration of how Telegram access could be used to cause trouble.
Hanan seemed to send a message from the Kenyan strategist’s account to one of their acquaintances by typing “hello how are you dear.”
Hanan bragged, “I’m not just watching,” before outlining how tricking the messaging app into sending messages may be used to disrupt a rival’s election campaign.
Hanan then showed how – once the message had been read – he could “delete” it to cover his tracks.
In another video published by frontal, a reporter traced out the Kenyan recipient of the chats and discovered that Team Jorge had indeed hacked his account.
Read the exposé here.
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