Hacking Team Hacker Behind WikiLeaks Turkey AKP Emails Dump

Phineas Fisher, the hacker responsible for breaching the Hacking Team servers last year, has taken responsibility for hacking into the servers of the AKP (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi / English: Justice and Development Party), Turkey's ruling party.

According to his own accounting of the incidents, he hacked into the AKP's email servers trying to gather intelligence to support the people in Syria's Rojava and Bakur provinces, made up mainly of Syrian and Turkish citizens of Kurdish descent, who Phineas Fisher claims have been attacked by Turkish forces.

WikiLeaks didn't know they were working with Phineas Fisher

The hacker explains that, after downloading some of the data, he gave half of it to a member of those two provinces, which, in turn, handed it over to WikiLeaks for analysis.

WikiLeaks decided to publish the data after the failed military coup in Turkey, to take advantage of the big media hype surrounding Turkey.

Phineas Fisher opposed this move since he still had a foothold on the infected APK server and was still downloading data.

The Rojava and Bakur representative told WikiLeaks to hold off on publishing the data, but WikiLeaks went on and did it anyway.

The hacker supported the Kurdish population in the past

Phineas Fisher has hacked targets in the past to support to Rojava region. During his latest hack, Fisher breached a bank, stole funds, and donated them as Bitcoin to a Rojava crowd-funding campaign.

After WikiLeaks dumped the AKP data, Turkey banned access to WikiLeaks from within the country. Currently, accessing the WikiLeaks AKP data dump URL also triggers a warning from your browser, the site being marked as dangerous (it's not).

Below is the hacker's entire statement, which he posted on sites such as PasteBin and ZeroBin. Below that is an interview he gave reporters prior to taking credit for the AKP hack.

“  Turkey [2][3][4]. I don't see leaking as an end in itself, so I was talking with people in Rojava and Bakur to see how best to use the access I'd gotten. There was a miscommunication between some of them and someone gave a copy of the first file I'd downloaded (which had about half of @akparti.org.tr's email up to that point) to wikileaks. They quickly corrected the miscommunication and asked wikileaks to hold off on publishing it, but wikileaks decided to publish now anyway with the international attention from the recent coup attempt. To be fair to wikileaks, they didn't know I was still in AKP's network downloading files at the time they announced they were publishing [5], but they did know that the source who had given them the file was asking them to wait...  ”

Play Video