Five months ago, we found evidence Joy Reid’s now-defunct blog, The Reid

Report, was breached after a review of suspicious activity.

We discovered that login information used to access the blog was available on
the Dark Web and that fraudulent entries – featuring offensive statements – were
entered with suspicious formatting and time stamps. The posts included hate
speech targeting marginalized communities and Ms. Reid has been explicit in
condemning them.

Some of the posts in question were made while Ms. Reid was on the radio
hosting her show. Text and visual styling was inconsistent with her original
entries.

In December, shortly after the review, Ms. Reid’s attorney wrote

to archive.org and Blogger.com to advise them that the blog had been
compromised, and that the pages appearing in the Wayback Machine archive
included fraudulent posts.

The letters detail the evidence that many of the blog posts were made up,
including the times posted (times when Ms. Reid hosted her radio show), unusual
structure and anomalies within the posts and ghosting around images.

We also asked Blogger.com for forensic data such as time stamps, IP addresses,
and User-Agent data which would help us to learn more about the posts and
where the fraudulent poster might be located. Blogger.com told us the data was
not available.

At no time has Ms. Reid claimed that the Wayback Machine was hacked,
though early in our investigation, we were made aware of a breach
at archive.org which may have correlated with the fraudulent blog posts we
observed on their website. We simply wanted to ascertain whether that breach
was related to the compromising of Ms. Reid’s blog.

Once our team determined that the two intrusions were unrelated, we merely
attempted to have the fraudulent posts removed from archive.org. They refused
this request.

However, we have significant evidence indicating that not only was Ms. Reid’s
old blog compromised, some of the recently circulated posts were not even on
the site at any time, suggesting that these instances may be the result of
screenshot manipulation with the intent to tarnish Ms. Reid’s character. Oddly,
there were no responses in the comments section of the entries, despite the
inflammatory nature of the posts. If those posts were real, they would have
undoubtedly elicited responses from Ms. Reid’s base. There was also no
contemporaneous verification or memory from Ms. Reid’s peers or individuals
she regularly debated online.
As a result we are continuing our own investigation and cooperating with federal
law enforcement in their attempt to identify the source of this activity.

Respectfully,
Jonathan Nichols
Independent Security Consultant

Jonathan Nichols is an independent security consultant. He has played a role in

predicting, detecting, and mitigating some of the largest hacking campaigns in
recent years. As part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring
Freedom, Jon spent three years deployed in support of NATO Special
Operations. Jon has years of experience in building cyber security teams which
focus on the humans behind the keyboards and the underlying influences which
motivate their actions. He can be seen discussing cyber security topics on CNN
and Vice documentaries, and regularly contributes to many mainstream media
articles on cyber security issues.