Court documents available to this paper indicate that former Cellcom Chief Executive Officer Avishal Marziano ordered the cyber-attack against Lonestar Cell in 2016.
“When I say Avi, I mean Avishal Marziano,” jailed British hacker Daniel Kaye told British Prosecutors during an investigation.
Kaye made this clarification after a photograph of both Avi Zaidenberg of the Liberian Shipping Company (LISCR) and Avishal Marzaino were presented to him by investigators. That was a day after he had mentioned that he was put in contact by one Avi who had introduced himself as someone who work at LISCR.
If the Kaye’s testimony is anything to go by it shows how desperate Avishal was to destroy Lonestar and rob the Liberian Government of needed revenue to the extent that he would even engage in identity theft.
Avishal’s motives
According to Kaye, Avishal Marziano’s aimed was not just to infiltrate Lonestar Cell system and attack the network, but to also obtain customers’ databases and telephone numbers for subsequent publication. His sole purpose to have published Lonestar customers’ private text messages was to destroy the company’s reputation for good.
According to Kaye’s testimony Avishal was introduced to him by Ran Polani, one of the co-defendants in the Lonestar Cell MTN’s lawsuit against several individuals, Cellcom and Orange who later purchase the former company.
“Avi (Avisal Marziano) knew the basic technical details of the procedure (to launch the attack using DDoS). He also has a certain amount of technical background knowledge and was previously the CTO of Cellcom as far as I know,” said Kaye.
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Kaye during his interrogation revealed that Avishal had several goals. “Firstly, I was to carry out a DDoS attack. I also discussed parts of the intended basis of this with Avi, for example, the discussion about the 5m IP cameras seen yesterday as a screenshot relates to this-that was a theoretical discussion about how that could be done.
He also gave me order to infiltrate the Lonestar network. He suspected there was corruption between the government and Lonestar and I suppose to find evidence in the Lonestar files. He was also interested in customer data, databases regarding telephone numbers and the likes. A while later, we also spoke about damaging Lonestar’s reputation by publishing the abstracted data.”
The communication between Kaye and Avishal were done on Threema Messenger. The former Cellcom CEO uses the name Apoper on messenger.
-The inside story of Cellcom hack on Lonestar
By Othello B. Garblah
