ExxonMobil's latest coordinated hacking attack against climate scientists... Does it go all the way back to ClimateGate?

Working backwards, investigators found the Indian hack-for-hire firms, which led them to the guy who hired them, which led to the guy who hired him, which led to the DC lobbying firm, and so on...

DCI Group’s tagline is a little too on-the-nose. They might want to change it as the investigation progresses.

So it probably doesn’t go all the way back to ClimateGate (insufficient information so far). But more on that in a moment.

Ten years ago in 2015 (ClimateGate was in 2009), a number of hacking-for-hire firms located in India launched a whole bunch of hacking attacks against a whole bunch of people, most notably including the climate activists who uncovered the documents proving that Exxon’s own scientists in the 1970s warned them about the catastrophic effects of climate change. Exxon knew it all that long ago, and ever since, has joined other oil companies in coordinated advertising and marketing campaigns trying to discredit global warming. Convince people it’s a hoax so they’ll keep buying gas cars.

The FBI was onto these Indian firms for a long time, and the news broke this week (actually back in November, but it went bigger this week) that the guy who hired the guy who hired the Indian firms (with me on that?) has been identified and is in jail in the UK, and the US is trying to extradite him.

The Indian firms had been hired by a guy named Aviram Azari, an Israeli private detective. The feds nailed him a couple years ago; in 2023 he was sentenced to 80 months.

The recent news is that the guy who hired him, frequent collaborator and fellow Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit, is locked up in the UK and the US is trying to extradite him to give him the same treatment as Azari.

From the court documents and other sources, we’ve established that Forlit did all this in the employ of DCI Group, a public affairs consulting group that works exclusively with right-wing corporate clients. And in this case, they were working on a contract for ExxonMobil.

So, climate activists discover that ExxonMobil knew they were causing global warming as far back as the 1970s; ExxonMobil attempts damage control by hiring hackers to find something to discredit those same climate activists (spoiler alert: they didn’t find anything).

DCI Group is not new to such shenanigans. They make a number of appearances in Dr. Michael Mann’s 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the front lines. In 2006, DCI Group produced an animated YouTube video mocking Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, falsely crediting the cartoon to a random young filmmaker.

Hmm… DCI was bullshitting on behalf of climate deniers in 2006, and now more recently in 2015. ClimateGate broke in 2009 — smack in the middle of the two. Could DCI have been responsible for that as well?

(ClimateGate, for those unfamiliar, was a 2009 manufactroversy where hacked emails from a handful of climate scientists were cherry-picked, taken out of context, and reorganized to make it sound like the scientists knew their “narrative” was based on fake data. Check the Skeptoid episode for the full story.)

Cybersecurity writer Tom Uren points out that these Indian hacking firms really only began to be a thing around 2013, so based on that, he considers it unlikely that this same motley crew was behind the ClimateGate hack. However, there are plenty of other hackers in the world who could have been hired. It could easily be that ExxonMobil, DCI Group, and possibly even Azari and Forlit, were behind that one too. So far (as far as I’ve been able to learn from my sources) that’s not clear. So consider this a nomination, not an accusation.

I would like to report that I’ve got my popcorn at the ready to enjoy how this investigation unfolds, but it seems probable that Trump’s puppet Attorney General Pam Bondi will order the case dropped, and send ExxonMobil flowers.