Andrés Sepúlveda is a Colombian cyberhacker that claims to have manipulated elections in Latin America, including Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012 election.
The claims include countries like Panamá, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, and México. In between his declarations, there is an occasion in which his team installed malware in routers to another candidate, with the purpose of seeing the candidate’s speeches before their own teams did. They also sabotaged the electoral chances by making computers call thousands of voters at 3 am, angering the voters and making them switch political parties.
Sepúlveda is currently serving 10 years of jail time with charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, and violation of personal data and espionage, but on March 31st, 2016 an interview with Bloomberg was published, giving him the opportunity to tell his side of the story.
“My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumours – the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” the 31-year-old told Bloomberg.
Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign was the most complex according to him with a budget of $600.000. The 31-year-old Colombian talked about how his work went from stealing data and installing malware to manipulating the public with fake enthusiasm on social media, which included about 30.000 fake Twitter accounts with an over a year’s maintenance to make it look as real as possible. Minutes after the elections results, Sepúlveda destroyed all the information.
Similar tactics were used throughout Latin America to manipulate the elections, all in different degrees. He is currently serving jail time due to hacking crimes related to Colombia’s 2014 elections, in which he tried to help right-wing opposition candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga. who opposed peace talks with the left-wing rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
According to his Bloomberg interview, his services were not cheap but included everything the candidates needed. With $12.000 you could get a crew that helped hack phones, spoof, and clone web pages and could send mass emails and texts. For $20.000 you could get a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense.
Sepúlveda said his motives were political due to being “against dictatorships and social governments.” Nowadays he is allowed access to a computer with monitored Internet as part of an agreement in which he helps track drug cartels and uses his Social Media Predator program to scan tweets from pro-Islamic State accounts, which according to him has helped identify ISIS recruiters in minutes.
He’s now in solitary confinement, part of a maximum-security facility, and has to sleep with a bulletproof blanket and vest behind bombproof doors, but wants to make sure the public knows his side of the story, hoping for a reduced sentence.
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