‘Hundreds of targets’ in Qatar-linked hack, say lawyers for US lobbyist Broidy

Lawyers of Republican lobbyist Elliott Broidy said that hundreds of people, including senior officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria, were targeted by cybercriminals working for agents of the Qatari government.

Broidy, known as a top fundraiser for President Donald Trump, has accused the Doha government of hacking his email accounts and sharing personal information with US media outlets and PR firms working for Qatar.

According to the New York Times this week, Broidy’s legal team have now managed to identify as many as 1,200 other individuals targeted by the same cybercriminal, after more than 80 subpoenas and months of forensic analysis.

In statements Broidy made in March, he alleged that Qatar had targeted him for his advocacy work against Doha and "strong political views against Qatar’s state sponsored terrorism and double dealing."

Broidy, his wife, and some other associates all received similar phishing emails trying to trick recipients into clicking a link to a bogus website and typing a password, the New York Times reported.

The links were shortened by TinyURL, which the lawyers subpoenaed, asking what other shortened web links the service had provided to the same user over the previous year.

The response was 11,000 pages of “gibberish,” Lee Wolosky, a lawyer for Broidy, told the New York Times, so “we knew we were dealing with a serious player.”

The list of targets was collected in the course of the lawsuits that Broidy filed, accusing Qatar and several individuals of conspiring in the cyberattack against him, the newspaper reported.

Last month, a federal judge in California last month dismissed the claim against Qatar on the grounds of sovereign immunity, but Broidy’s lawyers are still pursuing claims against the individual defendants.