When Anonymous members level their sites at a corporate target, business leaders get worried.
Such appears to be the case with breaking reports suggesting that anonymous hacker Phineas Fisher is willing to shell out $100,000 in Bitcoin to hackers who can bag sensitive data from Halliburton.
Why Halliburton?
Although a reported manifesto from Fisher (so named) doesn’t specifically say, there are clues to why these Robin Hood style attackers might target an American oil company that featured prominently in some of the most egregious excesses of the Iraq war.
Nor is the “Phineas Fisher” party a stranger to subversive acts.
“I robbed a bank and gave the money away,” Phineas Fisher said in 2016. “Computer hacking is a powerful tool to fight economic inequality.”
More recently, the Christian Science Monitor came out with a piece showing activists contributing to memes with titles like “oil companies should clean up their messes.”
That, plus Halliburton’s addition to various public target lists from members of activist communities, suggests that Fisher is simply following suit in identifying some of the most unsavory players in the corporate world and asking others to go in guns blazing.
The rise of Bitcoin’s use in the hacker world is one of the biggest reservations that legislative members have to opening up the Bitcoin market further with new additions like a Bitcoin ETF, for example. Many of the fiercest criticisms of BTC center around its potential use to obfuscate not only transactions, but markets, as in SEC dithering over labeling coins as either assets or securities.
“Those who engage in semantic gymnastics or elaborate structuring exercises in an effort to avoid having a coin be a security, are squarely in the crosshairs of our enforcement provision,” said Jay Clayton, SEC chair, in legislative hearings in February of 2018. That consensus hasn’t changed – and that’s just the start, as U.S. senators voice concerns about such activities as BTC-fueled ransomware and yes, attacks bought and paid for with Bitcoin.
With that in mind, investors can check out prominent Bitcoin pay-to-play hacking schemes to understand how these types of events might influence both opinion and Bitcoin market value.
