JAKARTA - A new website has published leaked emails from some of the main supporters of Britain's exit from the European Union. According to a Google cybersecurity official and former head of British foreign intelligence, the website is linked to Russian hackers.
The website - titled "Very English Coop d'Etat" - said it had published private emails from former British spy Richard Dearlove, prominent Brexit campaigner Gisela Stuart, pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs, and other advocates of Britain's divorce from the EU, which was completed in January 2020.
The site argues that they are part of a group of pro-Brexit hardliners who are secretly carrying out attacks in Britain.
Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the email, but two victims of the leak on Wednesday, May 25 confirmed that they had been targeted by hackers and blamed the Russian government.
"I am well aware of Russia's operations against Proton accounts containing emails to and from me," Dearlove said, referring to the privacy-focused email service ProtonMail.
Dearlove, who headed Britain's foreign spy service known as MI6 between 1999 and 2004, told Reuters the leaked material should be treated with caution given the "context of the current crisis in relations with Russia."
Tombs said in the email that he and his colleagues "are aware of this Russian disinformation based on illegal hacking." He declined to comment further. Stuart, who led the Vote Leave British campaign, in 2016, did not reply to email inquiries.
Shane Huntley, who heads Google's Threat Analysis Group, told Reuters the "English Coop" website was linked to what Alphabet Inc's company knows as "Cold River", a Russia-based hacking group.
"We can see it through the technical indicators," Huntley said.
Huntley said the entire operation - from the Cold River hacking attempt to publishing the leak - had "clear technical links" to one another.
The Russian embassies in London and Washington did not return emails seeking comment.
The UK Foreign Office, which handles media inquiries for MI6, also declined to comment on the report. Another Brexit supporter whose email was suspected of being disseminated on the website also did not respond to the email.
How the email got there is not exactly known and the website that hosted it made no attempt to explain who was behind the leak. The leaked messages appear to have mostly been exchanged using ProtonMail. ProtonMail also declined to comment.
Reuters itself was unable to independently verify Google's assessment of Russian links to the website. But Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University, said the site was reminiscent of past hacking operations and leaks attributed to Russian hackers.
"What struck me was how similar MO is to Guccifer 2 and DCLeaks," he said, referring to the two sites that spread leaked emails stolen from Democrats in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential Election. he said.
If the leaked message is genuine, it would mark the second time in three years that Kremlin spies have been suspected of stealing private emails from a senior British national security official and publishing them online.
In 2019, classified US-UK trade documents were leaked ahead of elections in the UK after they were stolen from former Commerce Secretary Liam Fox's email account, and were briefly reported by Reuters. British officials have never confirmed the specifics of the operation, but the then British Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, said the hacks and leaks were an attempt by the Kremlin to meddle in the British election. But the accusations were immediately denied by Moscow.
The English Coop website itself has made various accusations, including one that Dearlove was at the center of a hardline Brexit conspiracy to oust former British Prime Minister Theresa May, who negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the European Union in early 2019, and replace her with Boris Johnson, who take a more uncompromising position.
Dearlove said the email captured "a legitimate lobbying exercise which, viewed through this antagonistic optic, is now the subject of distortion." Unfortunately Dearlove refused to comment further on the allegations.
Johnson, who took over as British Prime Minister since May 2019, has taken a firm stance against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, handing over hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment to the government in Kyiv. In April, Johnson visited the capital for a television walkabout with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Johnson was officially banned from Russian soil on April 16. Internet domain records show the "Coop" website was registered three days later. The URL includes the words "sneaky strawhead" in a real knock on Johnson's tousled hairstyle.
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