Phineas Fisher Offers $100,000 Bounty to Hack Banks and Oil Companies
Well, how 'bout that.
An infamous vigilante hacker known for their hits on surveillance companies is launching a new kind of bug bounty to reward hacktivists who do public interest hacks and leaks.
The hacker, known as Phineas Fisher, published a new manifesto on Friday, offering to pay hackers up to $100,000 in what they called the 'Hacktivist Bug Hunting Program." The idea is to pay other hackers who carry out politically motivated hacks against companies that could lead to the disclosure of documents in the public interest. The hacker said he will pay in cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Monero. As an example of targets, the hacker mentioned mining and livestock companies in South America, Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, and oil company Halliburton.
To be clear, this is basically a bug bounty that incentivizes criminal activity. Most bug bounty programs are run by companies to encourage security researchers to find bugs in their software that they can then patch to make their services safer. Other bug bounty programs are run by third-party companies like Zerodium, which pay hackers for bugs in software like iOS, Android, or Chrome that can then be re-sold to governments.
Phineas Fisher is one of the most influential and well-known hacktivists since the days of Anonymous and LulzSec. In 2014, the hacker stole internal data from the British-German surveillance vendor Gamma Group, which makes the controversial spyware FinFisher. A year later, Phineas Fisher came back and broke into the servers of Hacking Team, an Italian company that made hacking and surveillance software for police and intelligence agencies around the world, exposing all the company's secrets. Then, the hacktivist hit a Spanish police union and Turkey's ruling party in 2016. Their identity has never been made public—even after an extensive investigation into the Hacking Team hack, Italian authorities admitted they have no idea who PhineasPhisher is.
In their new manifesto, Phineas Fisher also claimed to have hacked an offshore bank and called on other hacktivists to join in the fight against inequality and capitalism. The hacker said that in 2016 they hacked the Cayman Bank and Trust Company from the Isle of Man, an island between the UK and Northern Ireland. The hacker said they were able to steal money, documents, and emails from the bank. They declined to reveal how much money they stole, but said it was "a few hundred thousand" dollars.
"I robbed a bank and gave the money away," Phineas Fisher wrote in the manifesto. "Computer hacking is a powerful tool to fight economic inequality."
Arguing why it was justified to leak the bank's internal emails, Phineas Fisher wrote that "privacy for the powerful is not the same, when it allows them to evade the limits of a system itself designed to give them privileges; and privacy for the weak, which protects them from a system conceived to exploit them."
Well, how 'bout that.
