Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim
Reform UK leader alleges Moscow hacked his phone and leaked £5M gift story, but security specialists await evidence
National security and digital forensics experts have called foul on Nigel Farage's "disturbing" and unsubstantiated claim that Russia was behind the leak of a story about the UK politician receiving a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Sources inside Farage's right-wing Reform UK told the Mail on Sunday that the party leader believes Russian spies hacked his phone and relayed details about Christopher Harborne's gift, a matter of which only four people were aware.Farage was said to have engaged outside "counter-espionage experts" to perform a technical analysis of his device – analysis that was said to point to Russia.
According to Peter Sommer, professor of digital forensics at Birmingham City University, whichever outfit was entrusted to carry out this work would have been looking for two different types of markers to prove Russia was involved.
These would be either the phishing message Farage clicked on that allowed Russia to access his private communications or the malware code an attacker used to exfiltrate them."It's obviously trivial to disguise the source of an email, so that doesn't help," Sommer told The Register."And the second thing is if you're talking about looking for hacking codes, hackers, whether they are juveniles or people in major SIGINT systems, are likely to be stealing from each other, so there's nothing unique about a code that would say where it comes from."Sommer also highlighted that advanced intelligence powers have tools at their disposal to obfuscate the source of malicious code. The CIA's leaked Marble Framework supposedly had the ability to translate malicious code into any language, including those used by its chief adversaries."Now, absent from that, how on Earth do you determine that this is a Russian hack?" Sommer asked.
