Hacker Offers $100,000 In BTC As Halliburton Hack Bounty

An anonymous hacker named Phineas Fisher will pay around $100,000 in cryptocurrency to hackers who will leak damaging information about global high profile firms. The hacker offers $100k in BTC as a bounty for the “Hacktivist Bug Hunting Program” which was published on November 15 – targeting big companies including the Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group and the American oil company Halliburton.

According to reports from Vice which went viral in the Bitcoin scam news, the idea of the new bounty is to pay other hackers who carry out politically motivated hacks against other firms. This would lead to the disclosure of documents in the public interest. There are other targets too, including the mining and livestock companies in South America.

As the hacker offers the $100,000 in BTC, other hackers seem motivated. Phineas Fisher published the manifesto on Friday and said that he will pay hackers in cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin (BTC) or the privacy-oriented coin Monero (XMR).

The hacker offers the bounty but has not been identified yet. Some say that there may be a group behind all this. In the published document, the hacker noted:

“Hacking to obtain and leak documents with public interest is one of the best ways for hackers to use their abilities to benefit society […] I’m not trying to make anyone rich. I’m just trying to provide enough funds so that hackers can make a decent living doing a good job.”

As Vice further reported, the identity of Phineas Fisher has never been made public, even after an investigation in the famous Hacking Team hack. However, what we know so far is that in 2015, Phineas was in the cryptonews for taking over the servers of the Hacking Team – an Italian firm providing hacking and surveillance software for police and corporations. His main intent was to expose all of the company’s secrets in a 400-gigabyte torrent file which contained internal emails, files and source code.

The hacker offers a bounty now and is known as one of the most dangerous hackers out there. Even with his “hacktivism” approach, he definitely raises a lot of eyebrows in the crypto community.