A prominent fundraiser for US President Donald Trump’s campaign, Elliott Broidy, has gathered documents for filing a lawsuit against Qatar as a response to the hacking of his email and attempts to forge facts and e-mails, the New York Times reported.
The US newspaper revealed the involvement of the Qatari regime in spying on 1200 people around the world, including the Gulf, noting that many of the figures began to sue Qatar on the grounds of that subject.
The newspaper pointed out that Qatar has hired a specialized piracy company - whose nationality has not been identified - to spy on senior officials in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Egypt, senior UN officials , and US, British and Dutch figures known for their criticism of Qatar as well as officials of PR companies that have business with the Gulf Cooperation Council.
It also mentioned that Qatar spied on people who did not show hostility towards the country, including Americans of Syrian origin, activists, a CIA official, and even Bollywood actors.
The links to the bogus websites always were presented in compressed shorthand, provided by the online service TinyURL and presumably used to mask details of the addresses that might reveal the ruse. So Mr. Broidy’s lawyers sent a subpoena to TinyURL asking what other shortened web links the service had provided to the same user over the previous year.
The response was 11,000 pages of “gibberish,” said Lee Wolosky, a lawyer for Mr. Broidy, so “we knew we were dealing with a serious player.”
Those 11,000 pages contained computer code setting up thousands of bogus web pages intended to trap at least 1,200 targets, and the code for each web page contained the email address of its intended victim. Although it was unclear which targets fell for the trick, the hackers sent repeated emails to those who did not.
Lawyers for Mr. Broidy argued in court filings that the hackers who had stolen his emails almost always hid their location, but at one point they appeared briefly to have operated from a telecommunications network in Qatar.
