While one hacker has been exposing wealthy Germans’ financial secrets, another has been pulling more high-profile, but arguably more harmless tricks.
A hacker going by the nom du pirate “Guccifer” has popped open the inbox of John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Doerr, a firm that invested in early in tech giants like Google and Amazon. Doerr is a multi-billionaire and former Intel executive who is routinely cited as one of the most influential people in tech, even though he uses an AOL email account, which to most techies is practically like using pen and paper.
In recent weeks Guccifer has been focused on former American politicians, and his stunts have included
- revealing the post-presidential artwork of George W. Bush, which I actually think is quite nice
- cracking the e-mail account of an adviser to Hillary Clinton to find confidential memos he sent her
- filling former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Facebook page with anti-Bush graffiti.
That last experience likely helped Guccifer target Doerr—Powell is a strategic advisor to his firm. As in previous hacks, he has sent evidence of his exploits to media outlets to publicize his latest break-in. There aren’t any published details from Doerr’s inbox, so we’ll just have to imagine about the latest missives from Sergei and Jeff.
While Guccifer’s identity remains a secret, he’s apparently a subscriber to a variety of global conspiracy theories, although he has yet to unearth much in the way of evidence. Maybe he can at least get to the bottom of why Apple hired Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch.