I am perfectly willing to believe that this person has at least some responsibility for the attacks, what I don't believe is that he did it using all these 1337

I am perfectly willing to believe that this person has at least some responsibility for the attacks, what I don't believe is that he did it using all these 1337 swordfish style skillz as he describes. I'd put money on all of them involving basic social engineering and spear phishing with PDFs.