The hacker was promised a large amount of money to get the job done

Nov 6, 2013 14:05 GMT  ·  By

A hacker says he has been hired by Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, to destroy a video of him smoking crack cocaine.

The story about the tape surfaced several months ago, but the mayor denied the existence of the video until Tuesday, when he finally admitted that he had smoked crack cocaine.

A hacker has told VICE that Ford’s Communications Director, Amin Massoudi, contacted him to breach a server they believed held the only copy of the controversial video.

The video was allegedly stored on goonies.bugs3.com, a domain apparently owned by the Dixon St. Goonies street gang. The hacker was told to hack into the account and delete the file.

He was offered $220,000 (€162,000) for the job. Gawker raised $200,000 (€148,000) in an effort to buy the tape from the gangsters. The extra 10% the hacker was offered represented a bonus to make sure he wouldn’t be tempted to give the video to Gawker.

As a side note, after seeing that no one was coming forward with the tape, Gawker gave up and donated the raised money to Canadian charities.

The hacker told VICE that he managed to gain access to the account hosting the clip through a brute-force attack. He even managed to download two encrypted video files, but since he didn’t manage to delete them, he didn’t get the money offered by Amin.

At one point, Ford’s man became more desperate and told the hacker he was going to bring in more people to try to delete the tape of Ford smoking crack cocaine. Amin said he was going to give the bounty to the one who could get the job done.

Check out VICE’s article for additional details, including the emails allegedly exchanged by Amin and the hacker.