'I was thinking of not showing up to the interview,' he told me. He had already received one job offer-but still had an interview scheduled at one final company. I have previously interacted with Rob on about two occasions, minimally, when I had questions regarding Sakura Samurai's vulnerability writeups.)Д«ut back in 2015, Willis was just another hacker looking for an IT job. (The Sakura Samurai have, on many occasions, responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in the computer systems of government and private entities. Some in the information security community might know 'Rob' today as an active member who speaks at conferences and works with the Sakura Samurai ethical hacking group. The fake news impresario who has now decided to break his silence is 'ethical hacker' Robert Willis. We have also communicated with sources, both named and unnamed, some of whom are 'writers' who worked at the same company and have corroborated the hacker's claims.Д«ecause he requests that the company he worked for not be explicitly named, Ars has referred to the fake news company withвЂ¦ a fake name, Koala Media. Original note:В In a rigorous effort to fact-check the claims made here, Ars has seen written correspondence between the hacker and notable entities involved in producing fake news emails sent to him by prominent personalities publicly known to own (or be associated with) fake news sites tax forms showing income received by him from fake-news generation companies receipts for IT asset purchases, such as domain names emails from him to staff explaining strategy and assigning them tasks on a regular basis and archived copies of webpages, forums, and tweets produced as a part of this large operation. Update, October 17: Feedback from readers, including doubts about the veracity of some details as well as concerns that this story whitewashes the actions of the subject of the story have been addressed at the end of this article, here. You can see our story on this development here. Update, October 18: The subject of this story, Robert Willis, corroborated our reporting and revealed that he worked for Natural News in a blog post this morning. Previously dubbed 'Hacker X,' he's now ready to reveal who he is-and how he did it.

'This was normal for politicians, thoughвЂ¦ if you say a lie enough times, everyone will believe it.' 'Russia played such a minor role that they weren't even a blip on the radar,' the hacker told me recently. Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people's perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US. And he fooled unwary American citizens, including the hacker's own father, into regarding fake news sources more highly than the mainstream media. He devised a strategy that got prominent personalities-including Trump-to retweet misleading claims to their followers. Through extensive efforts, he built a secret network of self-reinforcing sites from the ground up. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content-from outright hoaxes to political propaganda-with the supreme goal of tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest 'fake news' operations in the US.ДЇor two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda.

Facebook hacking 2015