An undercover media investigation consortium, claims that an Israeli firm tried to hack, sabotage, and spread disinformation in an effort to influence over 30 elections around the world for clients. The majority of the attempts were focused on Africa.
Reporters posing as potential customers in order to learn more about the company’s methods. Thereafter, they gave it the nickname “Team Jorge”.Despite the fact that it does not exist legally.
The Israeli firm called the “Tal Hanan Group” because, according to information released by the group on Wednesday, its leadership is comprised of people who previously worked for Israel’s security services under a different name. They haven’t been able to track down any of the various sponsors who fund it.
The 50-year-old boasted to three undercover reporters that intelligence agencies, political campaigns, and private companies could all benefit from his “black ops” services.
The United States has become involved in at least one African election.Two of our teams are located in Greece and the United Arab Emirates. “We ran 33 presidential-level campaigns and won 27 of them,” he was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
He claimed that two-thirds of the campaigns took place in the African continent.
This is more proof that secretive private companies all over the world are making money off of intrusive hacking tools. And also the ability to manipulate public opinion using social media.
Hanan avoided answering specific questions and instead just said, “I deny any wrongdoing.”
Reporters from 30 publications, including Code for Africa, the UK’s Guardian, the US’s The Washington Post, France’s Le Monde, and Israel’s Haaretz, collaborated under the guidance of the French non-profit Forbidden Stories to produce the investigation published on Wednesday.
Aides in Kenya hacked
Reporters were shown what appeared to be a hack into the Gmail and Telegram accounts of political operatives in Kenya. This was just days before the country’s presidential election. Courtesy of a man named Tal Hanan.
According to Forbidden Stories, the victims were two William Ruto staff members. Ruto went on to win the election in August of 2022.
As of 2018, “Team Jorge” was implicated in the scandal widely known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There are allegations that now-defunct British consulting firm was used to create voter manipulation software favoring particular candidates. With Facebook’s permission, it was able to access the personal information of 87 million users, which it then used for commercial gain. One of their patrons was Donald Trump.
According to the claims made in the reports, nearly 40,000 social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn were controlled by a software platform called Advanced Impact Media Solutions that was used to carry out online public influence campaigns.
