Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

An established American law firm is being charged with using mercenary hackers to remove a former Wall Street Journal reporter from his position and damage his reputation.

The Journal's former chief foreign correspondent Jay Solomon claimed in a lawsuit filed late Friday that Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP collaborated with Indian hackers to steal emails between him and one of his important sources, Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima.

The messages, which Solomon claimed showed Azima discussing the possibility of the two of them starting a business together, were compiled into a dossier and successfully disseminated in an attempt to have Solomon fired.

Dechert "wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Mr. Solomon's employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington, DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him," according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Washington. The campaign, according to the statement, "effectively resulted in Mr. Solomon being shunned by the publishing and journalism community."

A message requesting comment from Dechert was not immediately responded to. Azima, who on Thursday in New York filed his own lawsuit against Dechert, did not immediately respond to a message. View More

The latest legal action following Reuters' reports about hired hackers operating out of India is Solomon's lawsuit. Several hack-for-hire businesses, including BellTroX and CyberRoot, which operate in the Delhi area, were involved in a decade-long string of espionage campaigns that targeted thousands of people, including more than 1,000 lawyers at 108 different law firms, according to a June report by Reuters.

Reuters reported at the time that individuals who had been the targets of hacking attacks while parties in at least seven different lawsuits had each opened their own investigations into the cyberespionage campaign.

Since then, the number has risen.

Solomon's former source Azima is one of those who has filed a lawsuit regarding the alleged hacking. Like Solomon's attorneys, his claim that Dechert collaborated with BellTroX, CyberRoot, and numerous private investigators to obtain his emails and post them online.

BellTroX and CyberRoot could not be reached right away and are not parties to the lawsuit. Both companies' executives have previously denied any wrongdoing.

According to Solomon and Azima, Dechert carried out the hack-and-leak operation in Ras Al Khaimah's ruling Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-best Qasimi's interests. According to Reuters, Ras Al Khaimah's investment agency, RAKIA, used the emails to prove Azima committed fraud in a London lawsuit that was filed in 2016.

Azima is attempting to have the judgment overturned because she rejects the fraud claims made by RAKIA.

The Associated Press published two articles about Azima in June 2017 as a result of the leaked emails, one of which revealed the airline tycoon had provided reporter with a free flight.Solomon received a small stake in the business he was starting. Solomon was fired by the Journal for ethical violations just before the AP's story was published.

Solomon claims he never accepted Azima's invitation or gained anything material from their union. The former journalist claimed in a first-person account of the scandal that was published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018 that he never objected to Azima's talk of business opportunities because he was trying to amuse a man who had been essential to his Middle Eastern reporting. However, Solomon claimed he had been the target of a "incredibly effective" information operation. Solomon acknowledged making "serious mistakes in managing my source relationship with Azima."

The Journal declined to comment because it is not a party to the lawsuit. The AP did not respond to a message right away.

Before being fired, Solomon received numerous honors for his work as a foreign correspondent. He declined to make an official statement about the lawsuit, but in his 2018 account, he described the incident as a cautionary tale for reporters.

Leaks and hacks of emails and correspondences, he warned, "can blow up intricate reporting and ruin months, if not years, of work."