The traditional calm in Modiin, a city halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, contrasted this Wednesday with the international media noise caused by the actions planned from one of its offices. A small group of Israeli experts, led by businessman Tal Hanan (50), used his contacts with intelligence services, security organizations, companies and politicians in the world and a range of technological instruments to interfere in elections in around thirty countries. and carry out disinformation campaigns in exchange for the remuneration of the client on duty in Africa, Asia, America or Europe. According to himself, one of his jobs was the cyber attack on the Generalitat during the independence referendum in 2014.
After an investigation in cooperation with other international media, two journalists from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and its economic daily The Marker reveal that the so-called Team Jorge (after Hanan’s pseudonym) carried out acts of hacking, sabotage or promoting political processes , incrimination and discredit of commercial and political rivals of their clients.
The Israelis cited in the report, some with security and intelligence experience, deny doing anything illegal or irregular. But in conversation with the two Israeli journalists and a Radio France reporter who posed as advisers to a potential client, Hanan, for example, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack during the Catalan independence referendum held on November 9, 2014. The action against the Generalitat was carried out with the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) technique, flooding the server with requests directed to a website until it collapsed.
The then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, has asked the Spanish government for an investigation “now that we know who promoted the attack but not who commissioned the Israeli company.” “It is necessary to know if also in this case, any State body or one linked to it, had some type of participation in actions that under any prism can be considered criminal,” he added after the information on Wednesday in which Hanan also refers to leaks about unproven links between the Islamic State terrorist group and the independence movement.
Twenty-seven of the 33 presidential election campaigns he meddled in were successful, Hanan told reporters who do not doubt his role in the election even if he exaggerated the number to show off his effectiveness and impress them while presenting his chances.
Hanan, his brother Zohar and the rest of the company do not sell cyber espionage capabilities to a State without knowing that they are used illegally and immorally as the Israeli company NSO alleged with its sophisticated Pegasus. Its “Active Intelligence” offer is broader and more attractive to the highest bidder: falsification of reports, theft of bank documents, creation of fictitious identities on the networks (in December it had 39,000 false profiles mobilized in a group with the Advanced Impact software Media Solutions to disseminate negative or positive messages influencing public opinion), fake news to encourage chaos, hostilities or sympathies always depending on the client’s request, infiltration of emails and accounts, messages on mobile phones, etc.
The revelation of his actions in which ethics play no role began in July with a call received by Mashy Meidan (Max) from someone who presented himself as an adviser to a businessman close to the ruling family of an African country interested in not The scheduled elections will be held two months later. After their first conversation on ZOOM, the owner of the company, Jorge, came into play. I mean, Hanan. He reveals that he was commissioned to sabotage the cell phones of opposition party leaders in Nigeria in 2015. He is also credited with the cyberattack against the central electoral commission a month before the 2019 elections in Indonesia and actions to smear or support public figures in various countries.
In a presentation, Hanan denied that Telegram is a secure network: “I will show you how secure it is… This is the Telegram of a minister in a country.” He also showed the hacked accounts of five people belonging to the environment of the President of Kenya, William Ruto, the Minister of Agriculture of Mozambique or an Indonesian businessman.
According to the Israeli media, a large part of the revelations based mainly on the meetings with Hanan were confirmed by dozens of journalists in different countries as part of the Forbidden Stories investigative project.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
