Welcome to Confidential Informant, your inside look into the world of digital privacy.
On Friday, I spoke on a panel at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York titled “Leaking and Investigating the Epstein Files” alongside a hacker who breached the Yahoo inbox of Jeffrey Epstein.
Yet this hacker, who has been in hiding ever since, was not there in person. In fact, he didn’t even appear on video or call in to speak. Instead, he sent encrypted messages to the panel’s moderator to read aloud to the audience.
The other panelists were Emma Best, co-founder of the leak archiving organization DDoSecrets, and Reuters journalist Raphael Satter. We’d all been chosen for this panel due to our exclusive reporting on Epstein, which includes my articles on the hacked emails of Epstein associate and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack. Those articles revealed details on the pair’s years-long friendship and Barak’s private remarks regarding Epstein’s island.
For me, though, the hacker, who goes by the name Kyrie, was the most interesting part of the talk. Last year, Kyrie provided DDoSecrets with 20,900 unredacted emails and file attachments sent and received by Epstein from 2002 to 2019. These are not the Epstein emails from his Gmail account that have received much more public attention.
Kyrie discussed the shock of gaining access to Epstein’s Yahoo inbox and even said he came across evidence — including multiple active login sessions — that others were digging through the emails at the same time as him as well. This was all after Epstein’s death. Kyrie was proven right when Bloomberg obtained the emails as well from a different source.
“At first, I didn’t fully grasp the scale of what I stumbled upon,” Kyrie said. “There were names after names, some that had never been publicly linked to Epstein before.”
Kyrie went into hiding over fears of retaliation and uprooted his and his family’s entire lives, telling that crowd that his decision to hand the emails over to DDoSecrets cost his family “a lot of freedom and sleepless nights.”
When asked at the conference whether he’d do the same thing all over again if given the chance, he actually said he would not access and leak Epstein’s emails again, even though he felt it was the right decision at the time.
“It’s not worth all the paranoia and financial losses in the position we were in, but it’s the right thing to do for the victims and their families to let all their crimes come to light,” Kyrie said.
As far as I know, this is the only time Kyrie has made any sort of public statement about his hack. And it’s unlikely we’ll hear from him again anytime soon.
What I’m reading
- Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side With Them: 404 Media reports that a person in Connecticut attempted to use a technique known as “prompt injection” to win a court case. This person, who was representing themselves, included hidden text inside their court filing that ordered AI to rule in their favor. Essentially, the person was hoping that the judge was using AI as well and that the hidden prompts would urge the judge to take this person’s side.
- Trump turns to private sector in offensive hacking operations memo: Cyberscoop reports on President Donald Trump’s signing of a national security memorandum last week that would allow private sector companies to aid law enforcement in carrying out hacking operations against transnational criminal organizations.
- New York City Lawmakers Push to ‘Ban the Scan’ at MSG: Wired reports on the pushback against surveillance technology at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The iconic venue uses facial-recognition technology to scan attendees and has been embroiled in numerous scandals for tracking individuals, including people that MSG chief executive James Dolan considers personal enemies. Lawmakers, musicians and privacy advocates are now demanding change.
What do you want to know?
That’s all for this week. If you have a question you’d like me to answer about privacy, send me an email at mthalen@san.com, reach out on Signal at @mikaelthalen.12, or share it below. I’ll keep all your personal details private.
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More Stories from Mikael
- Your phone isn’t really eavesdropping. But it still knows all about you
- Someone cut down and stole every Flock camera in this Minnesota town
- Congressman says hack of his Signal account proves app is unsecure. Is it true?
Round out your reading
- All your questions about napping, answered.
- Trump’s $5,000 promise echoes past payouts that never materialized.
- Inside the effort to make data centers pay their share of electricity costs.
- Why did the Feds seize the ’largest Martian meteorite on Earth’?
- Photos and video show exactly where and when Trump visited Ground Zero after 9/11.
