Oxygen says in an email that no one’s email accounts were hacked, but that some people who worked on Holmes’ clinical trials were compromised.
Lynn Coryell, Vice President, Vital Care Management, and Sylvia Stacey, Strategy, Analytics and Financial Management, left Palo Alto Research Laboratories in the mid-1990s. They initially suspected that their accounts had been hacked and then came to believe they were likely the victims of identity theft.
Last November, Holmes canceled a routine email communication with Coryell over missing emails. Coryell contacted Holmes in December and didn’t hear back. Then she received an email on 29 January from someone named Alexis. “Your email have been compromised,” read the message. “We’ve just emailed you to inform you. You’ll have 30 days to upgrade to new email.”
After further miscommunication with Holmes, Coryell, Stacey, and two other former PARC employees, Tyler Swanson and Vicky McGuire, who all had access to the company’s proprietary data on Parkinson’s disease, started looking into the possible cause of the hack. Based on news reports, they found that hundreds of JPS, Questio and sinovel-linked emails had been stolen and sold on online auction sites, including Amazon, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail.
In March, Coryell, Stacey, and two other former PARC employees—Anderson Mahoney and Dan Cooper—went to an FBI conference. They filed a report naming Holmes, PARC, and eUniverse LLC as the likely perpetrators of the hack. The FBI informed them it was looking into the matter. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
“In the absence of having any evidence—hard evidence—to indicate that she was a perpetrator, at this time we have to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was not one of the perpetrators,” says Sanford Butts, the founder of Retired Detectives for Seniors and the congressman who sent the original letter to the SEC. “But we do have to take a look and evaluate her in light of the facts that have come to light in the filing of the complaint.”