Email from George Friedman--I think he's been hacked.

So I was up late due to insomnia and decided to flick through my emails a bit ago. This one stood out to me because it was from George Friedman, the head of Stratfor ([email protected] is the address listed as from). I thought "Ok, that's weird." but it had the subject line of "Rate Incident Report Form". Since I had given my email some time ago to gain access to an article or two I thought I should click to find out what was going on. Below is the text that was in that email. It was received at 2:52AM CST on January 6, 2012. I provide that because I know data is important no matter how obscure.

For the video announcement, please see www.youtube.com...
Read full press release: bolt.thexfil.es...!t
Rate Stratfor's incident response: img855.imageshack.us...

Hello loyal Stratfor clients, We are still working to get our website secure and back up and running again as soon as possible. To show our appreciation for your continued support, we will be making available all of our premium content *as a free service* from now on. We would like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds. Please fill out the following form and return it to me

My mobile: 512-658-XXXX My home phone: 512-894-XXXX

Now, it seemed legit until that last bit about the hackers...then I started looking at the links. The words buried in the last link gave it away, but I thought I should be sure since there was a You Tube link. So I opened up an incognito window, scanned the link, and clicked to find it was the dreaded Rick Roll. I have not clicked the other links AND I have placed X's over the last 4 digits of the phone numbers just because I don't want to risk a) violating TOS, b) violating some obscure federal law, or c) ticking off anyone at that number should they be inundated with calls due to me ignoring this.

I am not sure if this is related to the original Christmas Day hacking of Stratfor or where to put this, so I chose the General Conspiracy forum to at least get this out there. If it needs to be moved then please do so because this site has grown so much since I last made a thread (2008...>.> maybe?) that I can hardly keep track of them all.

Anyway, what's the deal?

It appears Lulz may have been had, and caek may have been shared...

Print the full numbers in the e-mail and I will let you know...

reply to post by YouAreLiedTo


I would, but I worked in realms where doing that kind of thing could get you fired to not at least have a mod come in and pat me on the head and hold my hand through this. I did check the numbers and they don't lead back to Stratfor proper, but a small construction office in Texas. So there is that to consider.

I hadn't seen anything posted on this anywhere so I was weirded out by finding this email "from" a guy I was told to read when I first started tip toeing into geopolitics and future trends (I came in via academia...so cut me a bit of slack on getting the recommendations for reading).

Upon inspection, Friedman lives in Austin, TX.

PM me those numbers... now I'm really curious!

Info in the e-mail has been "confirmed".

It appears that they sent this out from a hacked e-mail account to give all the disgruntled customers Mr. Friedman's personal information to let them give him a piece of their minds...

Again, LuLz...