Turkish trolls reportedly behind ticket scams/hacks against “The Promise”

April 22, 2017 By administrator

Social media users across Facebook have come to complain about ticket scams and hacks they experienced when trying to purchase tickets for the Armenian Genocide-themed movie “The Promise”, a representative from the Armenian National Committee of America said in a Facebook post.

The war drama centers on a love story involving a medical student (Oscar Isaac), a journalist (Christian Bale), and the Armenian woman (Charlotte Le Bon) who steals their hearts. All three find themselves grappling with the Ottomans’ decision to begin rounding up and persecuting Armenians during the first genocide of the 20th century.

“Theaters in Boston, Framingham and Racine are experiencing in-advance sales, followed by late refund requests by purchasers of these sales, resulting in half-empty venues,” Aram Suren Hamparian said.

“Troubling, but not surprising, given Ankara’s shameful legacy of denial – from Capitol Hill all the way to Hollywood,” Hamparian said, suggesting that Turkish trolls are behind the scams.

One moviegoer said all the best seats were sold out as he was trying to buy tickets one week before the actual screening.

“I bought seats along the sides of the theater for my family. At the movie, every single one of the best seats were empty when we got there. When we asked the theater why a sold-out movie would have every single one of its best seats empty, they simply told us ‘it seems like those seats were purchased and refunded at the request of those who bought them.’ This way, people who want to see the movie cannot see it, yet the record will show at the end of the day that the movie was only barely half-full,” Dikran Kherlopian from Framingham said in a Facebook post.

As reported earlier, the picture appeared to be the target of a concerted campaign by Turkish cyber trolls who hoped to destroy it before it is widely released in cinemas.

The film currently has more than 120,000 reviews on IMDB.com, the online movie ranking website. That is almost double the number of reviews for Beauty and the Beast, which was released last month and seen by millions around the world.

Related links:

Aram Suren Hamparian’s Facebook

Pro-Erdogan supporters hack Twitter accounts

March 15, 2017 By administrator

Supporters of Turkish President Erdogan have posted messages on several high-profile Twitter accounts. The hackees include Borussia Dortmund, ex-tennis star Boris Becker, broadcaster ProSieben and Amnesty International.

The hackers posted early on Wednesday morning using the hashtags nazialmanya (Nazi Germany) and Nazihollanda (Nazi Netherlands), a swastika symbol and the sentence “See you on April 16.”

This is date of a referendum that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes will give him enhanced constitutional powers.

Read: Diplomatic row between Europe and Turkey escalates further

“We are aware of an issue affecting a number of account holders this morning,” a Twitter spokesperson said.

Hackers targeted several accounts with a large amount of followers. Among the victims were Amnesty International, the football club Borussia Dortmund and tennis legend Boris Becker.

Most of the posts have since been taken down.

Rising tensions

Some 3 million Turks live in Germany, a large number of whom are eligible to vote in the referendum. Turkish officials have been seeking to campaign in both Germany and Holland in recent weeks and have been largely blocked from doing so.

This in turn has raised tensions as the Netherlands goes to the polls and also adds grist to Erdogan’s mill that the EU is seeking to undermine his rule in Turkey.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, warned on Wednesday that the German government reserves the right to impose entry bans on Turkish officials hoping to campaign in Germany, though he said the measure would be a “last resort.”

This follows days of escalating tensions between Turkey and two EU nations, Germany and the Netherlands, over Turkish politicians’ hopes to campaign there ahead of their country’s referendum.

Erdogan has accused Germany of “Nazi practices” and recently labeled the Netherlands as “Nazi remnants” after it prevented two Turkish ministers from holding campaign rallies.

jbh/rt (dpa, AP)

Armenian hackers leak personal data of 1200 Azerbaijani officers

September 21, 2016 By administrator

armenia-hakers Armenian hackers have publicized the personal data of 1200 Azerbaijani officers.

The message disseminated by Monte Melkonian Cyber Army (MMCA) reads: ”The precious gift of MMCA to the 25th anniversary of the Republic of Armenian independence:

During the actions carried out by the group, the personal data of 1200 Azerbaijani officers were made available, these including ID numbers, phone numbers, residence addresses and other personal data.

As a result of another action carried out by the group’s Noyer_1K, n0p_c0ntr01, the customer database of one of the Azerbaijani banks, which includes the personal data of about 10,000 people, was made available…

Happy Independence Day, Armenia!!!!!!”։

The hackers have also broken 33 Azerbaijani websites.

Below are the links, where those data have been published:

Leaked Bank user’s data (10000)

https://ghostbin.com/paste/7fxao

azerbaijan military & police officer personal infos download links

https://ghostbin.com/paste/7f73t

Military men personal info download links

https://ghostbin.com/paste/4du29

Hacked websites (33) links

https://ghostbin.com/paste/qg3xb

Source: news.am

Scott.net report Hackers trace ISIS Twitter accounts to the British government

December 19, 2015 By administrator

main_hacker_against_isis By Jasper Hamill

Scott.net report Hackers have claimed that a number of Islamic State supporters’ social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the Department of Work and Pensions.

A group of four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec have unearthed evidence indicating that at least three ISIS-supporting accounts can be traced back to the DWP’s London offices.

Every computer and mobile phone logs onto the internet using an IP address, which is a type of identification number.

The hacking collective showed Mirror Online details of the IP addresses used by a trio of separate digital jihadis to access Twitter accounts, which were then used to carry out online recruitment and propaganda campaigns.

At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools they appeared to link back to the DWP.

“Don’t you think that’s strange?” one of the hackers asked Mirror Online. “We traced these accounts back to London, the home of the British intelligence services.”

VandaSec’s work has sparked wild rumours suggesting someone inside the DWP is running ISIS-supporting accounts, or they were created by intelligence services as a honeypot to trap wannabe jihadis.

However, when Mirror Online traced the IP addresses obtained by VandaSec, we found they actually pointed to a series of unpublicised transactions between Britain and Saudi Arabia.

We learned that the British government sold on a large number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms.

After the sale completed in October of this year, they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate.

Comment: Always make sure to keep your terror-related doings one step removed! Saudi Arabia has always been the convenient middleman.

Although the DWP denied owning the IP addresses at first, Jamie Turner, an expert from a firm called PCA Predict, discovered a record of the sale of IP addresses, and found a large number were transferred to Saudi Arabia in October of this year.

He told us it was likely the IP addresses could still be traced back to the DWP because records of the addresses had not yet been fully updated.

The Cabinet Office has now admitted to selling the IP addresses on to Saudi Telecom and the Saudi-based Mobile Telecommunications Company earlier this year as part of a wider drive to get rid of a large number of the DWP’s IP addresses.

It said the British government can have no control over how these addresses are used after the sale.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The government owns millions of unused IP addresses which we are selling to get a good return for hardworking taxpayers.

“We have sold a number of these addresses to telecoms companies both in the UK and internationally to allow their customers to connect to the internet.

“We think carefully about which companies we sell addresses to, but how their customers use this internet connection is beyond our control.”

The government did not reveal how much money was made from selling the IP addresses to the pair of Saudi firms, because it regards this information as commercially sensitive.

Armenian hackers publish secret Azerbaijani documents

September 28, 2015 By administrator

An Armenian hacking group, Monte Melkonyan Cyber Army attacked the official website of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Emergency Situations, uploading some secret documents online.

The group reported at the same time that they managed to crack nine other Azerbaijani websites. They published the documents of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the list of hacked sites in a Facebook post.

The attack was prompted by the Azerbaijani armed forces’ shelling of the Armenian border and the peaceful villages.

Turkish police paid 440,000 euros to hackers for spyware

July 9, 2015 By administrator

By Tolga Tanış,

The Turkish police paid 440,000 euros to an Italian hacker group between August 2011 and February 2015 to target certain individuals with specially designed spyware, according to leaked documents seen by daily Hürriyet.

The Organized Crime and Reporting Project (OCCRP) reported on July 8 that online hackers have released more than 400 GB of internal data, including staff emails and company documents, stolen from Hacking Team, a company in Italy that sells online spying software to governments and security services around the world. Report hurriyetdailynews

Hacking Team, which employs 40 people and has branches in the United States and Singapore, was named as a corporate “enemy of the internet” in 2013 by press-freedom advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, for selling its spy software to repressive regimes.

Although the company has been denying the reports since then, the leaked documents show that it licensed its sophisticated Remote Control System (RCS) spyware to a number of states, including Turkey.

An agreement between Hacking Team and Turkey’s Police Department was signed, and the first spyware was delivered in August 2011, according to leaked documents seen by Hürriyet. The Turkish signature belongs to Ahmet Koçak, who worked for Anti-Cyber Crime Branch of the police at the time.

Spying software, hardware, imported to Turkey

RCS is designed to remotely record every keystroke made on a target device, take control of cameras and audio records, steal all stored information and vacuum up passwords. In some instances, however, Turkish police wanted additional powers.

Documents show that Turkish officials applied on Dec. 11, 2013, to the company to send them a virus that would be “silently installed” on the computers of targeted visitors of a website, www.yuruyus.com. The company delivered it after six days.

A similar order from the police, this time involving an infected Word document titled “Mücadelem” (My Struggle) was delivered by the company in the same period in just three hours.

Beside software applications that were designed for the Turkish police, the company also delivered specially equipped hardware to Ankara, according to leaked documents.

An email dated January 2014, for instance, indicates that a 600-euro laptop computer with a “network injector” was sent from Italy, but became stuck at Turkish customs.

Contract renewed in 2015

According to the leaked documents, Turkish police decided to renew the contract with Hacking Team that would expire in November 2014. A police officer named Abdulkerim Demir sent the company an email on Feb. 11, 2015, to make a new contract.

After the company declined to prepare a new contract through its Singapore branch or extend the existing contract, Demir sent another email on Feb. 24, accepting the company’s terms.

Documents indicate that Turkish police used the spyware on 50 unspecified targets and paid 440,000 euros to Hacking Team with official invoices.

Ankara’s war on former ally, Gülenists

One curious aspect of the leaked documents is that the Turkish police used various Gmail accounts, instead of official email addresses, while contacting Hacking Team. All accounts have the same three letters at the beginning of the addresses: TNP, a reference to (T)urkish (N)ational (P)olice.

Notably, the police changed the Gmail address immediately after the Dec. 17, 2013, corruption investigation in Turkey, which created a rift between the Turkish government and its ally-turned-nemesis, the movement of the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen.

Labelling the investigation targeting several government figures as a coup attempt, Ankara responded by launching espionage investigations and engaging in a major reshuffle to uproot the alleged followers of Gülen within security and judicial institutions.

Leaked documents show that the correspondence between the Turkish police and Hacking Team intensified before the Dec. 17 investigation, but the deal between the two sides continued into this year, albeit via new contacts.

USA: pirated media Twitter accounts announce the 3rd World War

January 18, 2015 By administrator

Hackers took control momentarily Friday Twitter accounts of several US media, sending false tweets by which Pope Francis would have announced the start of the third world war or fighting between US and China.

On behalf of the news agency United Press International (UPI) reported that the Pope had announced that “World War III has begun,” while that of the New York Post said that including the aircraft carrier USS George Washington had been targeted by Chinese missiles.

A Pentagon official said that the one on hostilities with China was “wrong.”

The tweets have since been deleted.

The newspaper, owned by News Corp. Rupert Murdoch, said afterwards: “Our Twitter account was briefly hacked and we are investigating.”

Other false tweets were referred to the call of the president of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen an emergency meeting to set negative interest rates. Another tweet added that the head of Bank of America launched an appeal for calm, assuring that such action by the Fed would have no impact on savings accounts.

The Twitter accounts of several media were hacked in the last two years, including those of Agence France-Presse and the BBC.

On behalf of Centcom, the US military command in the Middle East, was also hijacked this week with no classified document is published.