Two of the men who allegedly conspired to hack into the personal email and phone accounts of senior US government officials, including the CIA director, John Brennan, and homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, appeared in US district court in Virginia on Tuesday.
The US and UK team of hackers broke into the personal accounts of Brennan, Johnson and several other officials and their spouses partially in a search for evidence of aliens, according to an affidavit supporting the arrest warrants for the two Americans in the five-person team.
British law enforcement appears to have aided the investigation, though the complaint itself is sealed.
Three teenage English boys referred to in the affidavit as Cracka, Derp and Cubed and two North Carolina men, Justin Liverman and Andrew Boggs, are listed as members of an alleged conspiracy to hack government officials that caused uproar last year. The English conspirators, who are all minors, were not charged in the government’s sealed complaint, according to the affidavit. They do, however, appear to have done most of the actual work.
The English alleged conspirators, especially the 17-year-old identified in the complaint only as Cracka, appear to have taken most of the information and conducted the social engineering on Verizon employees. Liverman allegedly suggested courses of action including “swatting” one of the victims – calling in a report of a violent crime in an effort to have a Swat team dispatched.
According to Twitter direct message logs acquired by the FBI, Boggs told Cracka that he was interested in “0wning the [CIA]” because “I’ve been looking for evidence of aliens since Gary”, probably a reference to Gary MacKinnon, a Scottish hacker who breached Nasa computers in an effort to find evidence of extraterrestrials.
Using “records from a Bitcoin exchange”, the FBI was able to trace Liverman across multiple registrations including phone and Facebook accounts for which he used the name Joseph Markowicz, according to the complaint.
Brennan is referred to as “Victim 1” in the affidavit, but tweets and screenshots described in the document align with coverage of the breach last year.
“[I] fucking own this loser,” Cracka replied. “[I] have just released emails of them admitting to torture.”
The same day, Brennan’s wife received an email notification from Verizon indicating that there had been an update to the couple’s account; recorded voice calls to Verizon allegedly included Cracka impersonating a Verizon employee and asking his “superiors” for access to Brennan’s account.
The FBI described in depth how it believed the five had worked together and how they were associated with their various pseudonymous social media, phone and email accounts. But on Friday, Motherboard reported that Liverman had in fact already been publicly identified months before the investigators made their move.
