A startup allegedly 'hacked the world', then came censorship, and now backlash
wired.com
wired.com
Just wanted to make sure that was clear.
If they were actually any good at the services they offered, they wouldn't need lawyers, they would manipulate the public record by hacking it!
- Appin, an Indian firm, is accused by Reuters of functioning as the e-commerce platform for hacking (similar to Amazon but for hacking). Users log in to a covert portal, place orders to hack into target mailboxes, make payments, and receive the delivered data.
- Appin received requests globally, including from RAW, IB, and the Indian military. However, when the Indian government detected financial irregularities, government contracts ceased. In desperation, Appin took on any available work, but it didn't survive.
- Despite Appin's demise, its former employees initiated similar ventures that are still active today.
Considering the involvement of the Indian government, I anticipated Appin and its founders to dispute the allegations, and they did. The article was subsequently removed, raising allegations of censorship.
The linked article discusses the backlash against this alleged censorship.
The timing of this article is intriguing, coinciding with the recent Pannun affair and now presenting another accusation, this time in the cyberspace. Reuters mentions that "The National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on foreigners for the U.S. government, began surveilling the company after watching it hack “high value” Pakistani officials around 2009, one of the sources said. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment." This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?
It's just pure coincidence. The APT was detected by SentinelOne Labs who then worked with Reuters to publish an investigation.
The Pannun stuff actually began in July 2023.
the thing I find interesting is of course the big international firms are vulnerable to this kind of thing, smaller content providers not so much.
So it's really straightforward, the Indian government can hack within the established global norms for spying, which they do. What isn't allowed to happen is NSA contractors losing their contract and pivoting to corporate espionage. There's no double standard here.
I understand Reuters taking down the article, but why would Lawfare or other blogs comply? What could an Indian court possibly do to someone entirely outside of their jurisdiction? It seems like the most appropriate response is "no, and we're going to publish the demand letters," which is exactly what techdirt did.
Let Rajat Khare - the guy who is likely behind Appin - file in a US (or EU, or wherever) court. In the US, at least, he'd have to provide some evidence that the article isn't true, which he probably can't.
Fuck Rajat Khare and Appin, the hacking company he almost certainly controls.
Realistically, he just has to be able to throw more money and lawyers at the situation than his opponents could. Maybe a bigger journalistic outfit could/would fight it, but the small blogs would probably be easy pickin'.
(Yes, not the same as court order but same story)
Would you just accede to the dictates of a court in a country to which you have no connection? That a much worse look, imo.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/metoo-media-assassins-clare-lo...
What devastating effects could possibly outweigh reporting on a company that does illegal hacking for hire?
…think of how many people that company employs! how many people would lose their jobs if anyone were to…
There are enough scamming companies in India hiring student leaving university with proper training for other jobs. Does it means we shouldn't take down those scamming companies because it hurts India economy?
That's not how injunctions work, that's not how international law works, and it has created a new cycle of news outlets being able to report on the fact that the company tried to gag them.
I'm having trouble figuring out which one of these articles has more information. Since the this one was posted earlier and is currently ranked higher on the frontpage, I guess it can be 'the one' for now. There are a bunch of techdirt-specific comments in the other thread that don't make sense to merge, so readers may want to check both.
Instead, many limited partners LPs are contributing members and the GP has control of the day to day even though he rarely contributes in any significant %
No one owns that structure. The GP controls it but at the mercy of the LPs for any major decision.
If you truly had an individual owner of a "fund" , this most likely is describing some other structure like a family office, for example.
It seems that we've built quite a capable ad machine. I wonder what it would look like if we built something for news. Certainly there would be less of this nonsense going on.
Like, kudos to those standing up to Appin, but the fact that facing down a bully is necessary at all is a design failure that I'd like to work to rectify.
Like Wikileaks?
Assange may have started out with pure intentions, but as he ran out of money, the only funding became available from the Kremlin. The cover for funding him was his show on RT, the Kremlin-funded English-language television station.
You might recall that Assange bragged about a huge dump of info about Putin and other Russian leaders/oligarchs that was soon to be dropped. It never did. It was either entirely BS from the start to provide cover, or existed but was withheld to keep happy his new sponsors.
You also may recall that the Wikileaks dumps of info stolen by Russian hackers on Hillary Clinton was miraculously released within hours of Trump's "I grabbed her by the pussy" tapes. A classic Russian disinformation move to distract the media, which was quite successful.
That's just glancing at a few highlights. By the time Wikileaks became significant, it was a straight-up Russian operation. It would have been a far better life decision for Assange to simply quit when he ran out of funds, than to sell out. Sad
> #29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more, no less.
-- The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
I would argue that the capitol raid fanatics are anarchists as well, under the cover of being republican voters. They don't mind the open power abuse by the Kremlin as well.
The core issue I have with the power play on the internet is that it leads to isolationist behaviors on both sides, which in return stalls democratic approaches to finding a compromise in between both opinions.
I am not sure if it is the fault of the internet and if this was better before, but the expectation was definitely that it helps bring people more together, not apart. All the various information, one click away. It takes really effort, to ignore all that and entrench in your bubble.
Wikileaks was perhaps most significant in 2010/2011 (the Manning Iraq / Afghan War leaks)... but you're right, at the very least, looks like he had been a tool (in both senses of the word) of the Kremlin pretty close to that moment already :
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/apr/17/world-tomorrow...
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...
It's also basic PR. Hell, watching "The Thick of It" is enough to teach you that when a bad story comes out, try to use a different story as a distraction. That hardly requires Kremlin support.
And yes, their apprentices on both sides of the oceans are learning well.
(read as: after NotPetya in 2014, which changed the scales of infrastructure targets forever)