An established American law company is being charged with hiring mercenary hackers to remove a former Wall Street Journal reporter from his position and damage his image.
The Journal’s former chief foreign reporter Jay Solomon said in a complaint filed late Friday that Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP collaborated with Indian hackers to obtain emails between him and one of his important sources, Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima.
The texts, which Solomon said showed Azima discussing the possibility of the two of them starting a business together, were compiled into a dossier and successfully disseminated in an attempt to have Solomon dismissed.
Dechert ‘wrongfully leaked this dossier first to Mr. Solomon’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington, DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to disparage and discredit him,’ according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Washington. The campaign, according to the statement, ‘essentially resulted in Mr. Solomon being shunned by the publishing and journalism communities.’
In an email, Dechert stated that it disagreed with the allegation and will contest it in court. Azima, who on Thursday in New York filed his own complaint against Dechert, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The latest legal action after Reuters’ reports regarding hired hackers operating out of India is Solomon’s lawsuit. Several hack-for-hire businesses, including BellTroX and CyberRoot, which operate in the Delhi area, were involved in a decade-long string of espionage attacks that targeted thousands of people, including more than 1,000 lawyers at 108 different law firms, according to a June report by Reuters.
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