By Joseph Simonson
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/joseph-simonson
A senior cybersecurity adviser to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign spent years affiliating with a hacking organization and boasted on a personal blog about breaking into her neighbor's computers.
Jackie Singh, who joined the Biden campaign in July as a senior cyber incident responder and threat analyst, was an affiliate of the hacking organization the Gay N- Association of America, once headed by white nationalist Andrew Auernheimer.
Logs obtained by the Washington Examiner from various Internet Relay Chat rooms, a messaging platform dating back to the 1980s which is popular with hackers, show Singh as a contributor to a toxic culture of overt racism. In August, Singh wrote on Twitter that her role with the Biden campaign focused on "working tirelessly to ensure the digital safety of this campaign."
From 2009 to 2016, Singh, under the username "jax," routinely spammed advertising for the GNAA, which relied upon shock messaging to attract members, in IRC channels. Screenshots show that Singh used the same handle, "jax.," on Stickam, a defunct streaming platform popular in the mid-2000s.
Evidence providing a picture of Singh's background raises questions about the vetting process of the Biden campaign in its hiring process, seven weeks before the Democratic nominee faces President Trump for the keys to the White House.
“People who are well respected, don’t come from trolling or hacking groups. There’s been a culture shift there. Companies don’t want to hire people with sketchy backgrounds," said Gene Spafford, a leading cybersecurity expert and Purdue University computer science professor. "They want people who are trustworthy. There are insider threat problems."
The GNAA, described by the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium as an "extremist right wing terrorist group," has claimed responsibility for a variety of attacks on webpages and businesses, including on then-candidate Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign page, and vandalizing the Wikipedia pages for Hillary and Bill Clinton in 2016.
Most of the chat logs obtained by the Washington Examiner come from the #2600 IRC channel, a popular hangout for hackers and those interested in cybersecurity. A 2017 University of Arizona study described the channel as a "highly active hacker community which quarterly publishes hacker magazines, organizes monthly hacker meetings, and regularly provides a forum for hacking knowledge dissemination, hacker events, computer underground organization, etc."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senior-biden-campaign-cybersecurity-expert-participated-in-racist-internet-troll-group