Hacking Attempt On Caruana Galizia’s Blog Days After Cardona Brothel Story May Have Been Trying To Reveal Her Sources
A 2017 attempt to hack Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog may have been trying to discover who the journalist’s sources were.
The attack, which occurred in February, 2017, occurred ten days after Caruana Galizia had reported on former Economy Minister Chris Cardona allegedly visiting a German brothel in the town of Velbert while on a work trip.
“This was a targeted specific attack,” IT expert Ian Castillo said in court today according to MaltaToday.
“I’ve been in this industry for 20 years… handled many ordinary hacking attempts. This was the only case I remember where we had social engineering. Someone did research to try and get information before the attack,” he continued.
According to Castillo, his company handled security for Daphne’s blog Running Commentary. On the 11th of Feburary, he received an email that seemed to come from Caruana Galizia asking how to access the blog. However, the email was actually “spoofed” and was a hacking attempt.
Castillo said this was not a “standard” hacking attempt as it didn’t use bots trying to penetrate the site, but was a person who knew names and emails. They wanted details that they could use to access the site and its DNS servers and records.
He confirmed that the attack could have very well “potentially led to the identification of her sources” and was probably carried out by a professional.
“It’s a resource-intensive attack. I reported the issue immediately to Daphne Caruana Galizia, who engaged a lawyer and I believe that she filed a police report about the matter,” Castillo said.
Another IT expert, Keith Cutajar, explained that the geolocation data for Cardona’s mobile phone could not precisely confirm whether he was at a brothel or a conference.
However, an analysis showed that he may very well have been at Acapulco brothel, which was in the town of Velbert, since the one cell tower that experts had information from was within range of Velbert.
However, it was also within the range of Essen, where Cardona’s conference was taking place. Cutajar said they would need information from three cell towers in total to accurately.
What do you think of these revelations?
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