Welcome to Confidential Informant, your inside look into the world of digital privacy.
[SAN] 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.
