The Dark Overlord appears to be trying to capitalize on conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks.
On Monday, New Year’s Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met.
The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businesses across the United States.
“We'll be providing many answers about 9.11 conspiracies through our 18.000 secret documents leak,” the group tweeted on Monday.
A spokesperson for the Hiscox Group confirmed to Motherboard that the hackers had breached a law firm that advised the company, and likely stolen files related to litigation around the 9/11 attacks.
The hacking group published a small set of letters, emails and other documents that mention various law firms, as well as the Transport Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Aviation Administration (The TSA could not provide a statement in time for publication, and the FAA told Motherboard in an email it was investigating.) Those documents themselves appear to be fairly innocuous, but the group says it may release more.
In its extortion note, The Dark Overlord included a link for a 10GB archive of files it allegedly stole. The group also provided a link to this archive to Motherboard before publishing its announcement. The cache is encrypted, but the hackers are threatening to release the relevant decryption keys, unlocking different sets of files at a time, unless the victims pay the hackers an undisclosed ransom fee in Bitcoin. (so much for BTC not being a "privacy currency")
“Pay the fuck up, or we're going to bury you with this. If you continue to fail us, we'll escalate these releases by releasing the keys, each time a Layer is opened, a new wave of liability will fall upon you,” the extortion note reads.
The Dark Overlord is also claiming to be offering to sell the data on a dark web hacking forum, and is attempting to blackmail individuals who may be included in the documents themselves.https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw79k5/hacker-group-threatens-dump-911-insurance-files-dark-overlordI get that a guy needs to be paid for his efforts, but I wish they would be humanitarian about it and just release the information.
If the information is truly important and groundbreaking, then I want the people to know about it, and I want to know about it..
These guys are criminals and all.. A lot of what they have done isn't exactly moral so I can't just side with them, but if they have any information for us that could stop this from happening again I would like to be out there for the good of humanity and the intelligence of us USA voters.
To me it sounds like they published the relevant documents but in encrypted form.
Even if they are in unbreakable form right now, maybe if the right people were to save these encrypted files some day in the future they could break them.
As for myself I wouldn't know how to label me as far as the 9/11 conspiracy goes..
I wouldn't say I'm a conspiracy theorist and believe all of the crazy conspiracies about 9/11, but I wouldn't say that I believe the official report 100% either..
New information would be welcome IMO almost BAMN (By Any Means Necessary)..
If a hacker were to find something and dump it I would respect that, but offering to accept money in return for never releasing it, I can't align with that..
