Anonymous Deeds Fight the Oppressor and Saves World
About Anonymous and the
History of the Modern Day Folk Hero
THE DREAD DISEASE OPPRESSION
Who controls access to knowledge the informational content
on the Internet?
Is it the person seeking information or the governmental
authorities seeking to limit access?
The limits of oppression are set by the rebellion of the
oppressed.
OPPRESSION by its very nature creates the power that crushes it. A Champion arises - a Champion of the oppressed - whether it be a Cromwell or someone unrecorded, he will be there. He is born. Then out of the mystery of the unknown appeared a masked rider who rode up and down the great internet Hiway punishing and protecting and leaving upon the great oppressor the mark of ZORRO aka ANONYMOUS.
honorable DEEDS
Free Network Foundation . FNF , a non-profit, peer-to-peer communications initiative striving to liberate the global Internet from corporate and governmental interference. Isaac Wilder and Tyrone Greenfield, communications director for the Free Network Foundation. A Global revolution, which comes in the form of nine-foot-tall Freedom Towers that beam out free, secure Wi-Fi to occupied sites and underserviced communities allows people to talk to one another online through no middle man.
The Global Intelligence Files - List of Releases re: Stratfor
Highlights, according to Wikileaks: their deals would also include
the use of privileged information to make money in financial
markets. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has
recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss
banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Government and
diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance
knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.
Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes
government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the
world.
Wikileaks has published five million emails from
Stratfor, an intelligence company based in Texas that, looking
at their practices, appears to be
America's very own privately run CIA
.
Stratfor CEO,
George Friedman
has tendered (or intends to tender) his resignation effective
immediately From Pastebin ~
@AnonymousIRC
2/21/12
Attack on Vatican Web Site
Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called
hypocrites & draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests,
and the church's World Youth Day among other issues.
Though Imperva declined to identify the target of the attack and
kept any mention of the Vatican out of its report, two people
briefed on the investigation confirmed that it had been the
target. Imperva had a unique window into the situation because it
had been hired by the Vatican's security team as a subcontractor
to block and record the DDoS attack.
A new age of Transparency Activism
WikiLeaks is a problematic system for acquiring and publishing
leaks. It's vulnerable to attacks from many sides: “patriotic”
rival hackers and terrorists, legal attacks from governments,
militaries and corporations. The value WikiLeaks provided to
Manning was legal defense. And has it
failed epically
on that front.Unless a journalist is willing to deeply embed
themself into the underground culture of Anonymous (a process that
would take months of serious research and relationship building),
she really has no way of confirming the validity of any Anonymous
attack until it's been reported by the victim. Anonymous has the
opportunity to become a powerful publicity machine for activist
causes, simply because the media is hungry to cover legitimate
attacks. The group is perhaps more adept at “hacking” the media,
generating a ton of interest around a specific issue, than pulling
off actual network intrusions. Which is why Anonymous's latest
“partnership” with WikiLeaks makes so much sense. Anonymous can
get the goods for WikiLeaks because, cloaked by anonymity, it is
willing and able to operate outside the law. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks
provides Anonymous with a powerful P.R. channel. The media trusts
WikiLeaks. It has a mailing address and an official spokesman.
It's able to add a layer of credibility to any leak it publishes
because it employs a paid staff. WikiLeaks and Anonymous could
prove to be powerful allies in their shared war against government
and corporate corruption.
Anonymous hacks Infragard again
2/27/12
Greetings Pirates! Another #FuckFBIFriday is here and once again
we emerge from the hacker underground to wreak havoc upon the 1%'s
institutions of repression"
DOS Denial of Service Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice
website vanished from the Internet.
Anyone attempting to visit it to report a crime or submit a
complaint received a message saying the site was unable to load.
More websites disappeared in rapid succession. The Recording
Industry Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of
America. Universal Music. Warner Brothers. The FBI. By nightfall,
most of the sites had come back online, but the people responsible
for the outages had made their point.
By clicking on a link, they could launch a page that asked them to
identify a target. Thousands typed in the address of the Justice
Department site and clicked enter, bombarding it with a fusillade
of meaningless commands. Overwhelmed, the site froze and dropped
offline. In the chat network where Anonymous coordinated the
attacks, the virtual warriors declared victory with a military
phrase: "TANGO DOWN." The software used to fire these Internet
missiles was the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a name lifted from the
video game "Command & Conquer." Yet the consequences of firing
it were real -- a major law enforcement agency's web site was
temporarily crippled, leaving the agency to observe that there had
been a "degradation in service."
August 19, 2011 The politically oriented hacking group,
Anonymous
, has released 1GB of what is says are private e-mails and
documents from an executive of a U.S. defense company that sells
unmanned aerial vehicles to police and the U.S. military. The
documents were publicized in a post on Pastebin, with links
leading to the actual material on another website. The material
purportedly belongs to Richard Garcia, a senior vice president at
Vanguard who was a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
special agent for 25 years.
Anonymous took special delight in the breach, as Garcia is
director of InfraGard, an organization that liaises between
private sector companies and the FBI. A group affiliated with
Anonymous called LulzSecurity, or LulzSec, breached and defaced
one of InfraGard's websites belonging to its Atlanta chapter in
June.
Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Federal Secret Loans
WHO GOT THE MONEY - The Feds Secret Liquidity Lifelines.
S&P and the Bildenbergers All Part of the Plan "The Treasury Department revealed that S&P's decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting. However, even after this enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This suggests that S&P had made the decision to down grade independent of the evidence. S&P CEO Deven Sharma was a key contributor at the 2009 Bilderberg Summit that organized 120 of the world's richest men and women to push for an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.
FANTASTIC! Operation Empire State Rebellion: Anonymous says it plans to target the NY FEDERAL RESERVE BANK
designed to shut down the agency's Web site starting 6/15/11. The group is calling for public protests until Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke steps down. The campaign, is timed to coincide with Flag Day in the U.S., which is June 14 and commemorates the adoption of the national flag in 1777.
LulzSec disbanded 6/25/2011 “We like to clarify again: All LulzSec members are accounted for, nobody is hiding. Only a name was abandoned for the greater glory #AntiSec,” says a tweet from @AnonymousIRC .
LulzSec
, known for recently attacking the websites of NPR and Sony
Pictures, claimed to have hacked 55 porn websites and
published
administrator emails and
passwords
. LulzSec also said they had hacked Pron.com and posted 26,000
user passwords and emails. Among the email addresses discovered in
the Pron cache, LulzSec made special mention of those belonging to
government and military employees. It was all "just for mild fun!"
according to the group's Twitter feed.
[via
Forbes
]
LulzSec have become Hacker Folk Heroes - http://uleak.it/?3ew practically overnight. Who is really to blame here? The companies that don't keep their customer's data secure or the hackers that expose it? LulzSec said that many of their previous high profile hacks used EASY exploits and well known software vulnerabilities. This means other hackers could have easily accessed, stolen and compromised the data as well, they just didn't advertise it to the world. The companies being hit either have 1) incompetent data security people; or 2) their data security people have made recommendations and management wouldn't fund it; or 3) they outsource all the data processing to outside companies who are NOT doing an inadequate job. As these hacks are more thoroughly investigated and reported, it will be interesting to see who really was responsible for the lapses. The Internet will eventually be a safer, better place because of these incursions.
Dear Internets: All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
Jun 5, 2011
Dear Internets, It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO
and our good friend Barrack Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have
recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat
hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated
website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked
its user base. We also took complete control over the site and
defaced it, check it out if it's still up:
http://infragardatlanta.org/ While not very many logins (around
180), we'd like to take the time to point out that all of them are
affiliated with the FBI in some way. Most of them reuse their
passwords in other places, which is heavily frowned upon in the
FBI/Infragard handbook and generally everywhere else too. One of
them, Karim Hijazi, used his Infragard password for his personal
gmail, and the gmail of the company he owns. "Unveillance", a
whitehat company that specializes in data breaches and botnets,
was compromised because of Karim's incompetence. We stole all of
his personal emails and his company emails. We also briefly took
over, among other things, their servers and their botnet control
panel. After doing so, we contacted Karim and told him what we
did. After a few discussions, he offered to pay us to eliminate
his competitors through illegal hacking means in return for our
silence. Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to
give us money and inside info in order to destroy his opponents in
the whitehat world. We even discussed plans for him to give us
insider botnet information. Naturally we were just stringing him
along to further expose the corruption of whitehats. Please find
enclosed Karim's full contact details and a log of him talking to
us through IRC. Also, enjoy 924 of his internal company emails -
we have his personal gmail too, unreleased. We call upon
journalists and other writers to delve through the emails
carefully, as we have uncovered an operation orchestrated by
Unveillance and others to control and assess Libyan cyberspace
through malicious means: the U.S. government is funding the CSFI
to attack Libya's cyber infrastructure. You will find the emails
of all 23 people involved in the emails. Unveillance was also
involved in a scheme where they paid an Indian registrar $2000 to
receive 100 domains a month that may be deemed as botnet C&Cs.
Shameful ploys by supposed "whitehats". We accept your threats,
NATO. Game on, losers. Now we are all sons of bitches, Lulz
Security
2011 Anonymous reveals passwords for hundreds of Middle East
government email accounts
Anonymous has been hard at work. After
hacking into Iran's government servers
and getting away with over 10,000 email messages, they have
launched yet another attack, this time targeting Middle Eastern
government officials, in what the collective calls support for the
Arab revolutions.
As reported on Twitter
, a document was released on PasteBin, a
site that already bears the reputation as a hangout for hackers
, revealing the log-in details of hundreds of government officials
from Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan.
March 14, 2011 OperationLeakS continues to
tweet out
links to mirrors of the files. Gawker's Adrien Chen, who has
sources within Anonymous, suggest there's something real to the
leaks.
#BlackMonday Ex-Bank of America Employee Can Prove Mortgage
Fraud Part 1
Bank of America employees' alleged orders to remove the Document
Tracking Numbers (DTNs) which are standard across all office
documentation from incriminating documents, deliberately making
them immensely difficult to track down.
We believe that the evidence that is supposed to be so damning is a series of emails showing that employees of Balboa asked for certain loan identifying numbers to be deleted, and they were.
Anonymous said late Sunday evening, however, “this is part 1 of the Emails.” So perhaps more incriminating correspondence is to come. And to be honest, these messages could be incredibly damaging, but we're not mortgage specialists and don't know if this is or isn't common in the field.
How is Balboa able to charge such inflated premiums and get away
with it?
It's all very simple. First, when you call in to customer service,
for say, GMAC, you're not actually speaking to a GMAC employee.
You're actually speaking to a Bank of America associate working
for Balboa Insurance who is required by their business to business
contract with GMAC to state that they are, in fact, an employee of
GMAC. The reasoning is that if you do not realize you're speaking
to a Bank of America/Balboa Insurance employee, you have no reason
to question the validity of the information you are receiving from
them. If you call your insurance agent and ask them for the
lienholder information for your GMAC/Wells Fargo/etc lien (home or
auto) you will be provided with their name, but the mailing
address will be a PO Box at one of Balboa's 3 main tracking
locations (Moon Township/Coreaopolis, PA, Dallas/Ft Worth, TX, or
Phoenix/Chandler, AZ) Tells me Boa is knowingly hiding Foreclosure
information from Feds…
March 7 2011 Wikileaks Bank Of America Fraud And Corruption Documents. make them pay #MakeWallstPay 600 homeowners have shut down DC Bank of America branch
Hacker Collective Anonymous To Release Documents Proving Bank Of
America Committed Fraud This Monday 3/14/11 By Tyler Durden
After Julian Assange crashed and burned in his threat to release
documents that expose fraud at Bank of America, many thought he
had been only bluffing, and that BofA is actually clean. Not so
fast. A member of the hacker collective Anonymous, which single
handedly destroyed "hacker defense" firm HB Gary [1], who goes
under the handle OperationLeakS [2]"is claiming to be have emails
and documents which prove "fraud" was committed by Bank of America
employees, and the group says it'll release them on Monday"
reports Gawker [3]. As to the contents of the possible disclosure:
""He Just told me he have GMAC emails showing BoA order to mix
loan numbers to not match it's Documents. to foreclose on
Americans.. Shame." If indeed this makes the case against BofA'
foreclosure practices stronger, it certainly explains why the
banking consortium is scrambling to arrange a settlement, and also
why Bank of America recently split off its $2 trillion in
mortgages [4]into "good bank" and "bad bank" entities.
As a "teaser", the Anonymous member released a November 1, 2010
email between two Balboa Insurance (a BAC subsidiary) employees,
which while not proving any fraud, indicates he/she does indeed
have access. The timeline on the email makes sense as it is a few
weeks prior to the original disclosure [5]that Wikileaks would
expose BofA. Perhaps the Assange team merely handed off its
materials to Anonymous, which has previously demonstrated its
solidarity with the Australian on various occasions.
The full letter is below.
[6]
Gawker with more on why Brian Moynihan may not sleep too soundly
overnight:
OperationLeaks, which runs the anti-Bank of America site
BankofAmericasuck.com [7], says the employee contacted the group
to blow the whistle on Bank of America's shady business practices.
"I seen some of the emails… I can tell you Grade A Fraud in its
purest form…" read one tweet. "He Just told me he have GMAC emails
showing BoA order to mix loan numbers to not match it's
Documents.. to foreclose on Americans.. Shame."
An Anonymous insider told us he believes the leak is real. "From
what I know and have been told, it's legit," he said. "Should be a
round of emails, then some files, possible some more emails to
follow that." The documents should be released Monday on
Anonleaks.ch [8], the same site where Anonymous posted [9]
thousands of internal emails from hacked security company HBGary
last month. That leak exposed [10] a legally-questionable plot to
attack Wikileaks and ultimately led to the resignation [11] of
HBGary CEO Aaron Barr.
It is unclear whether this will be yet another climax-free build
up, but Anonymous has certainly proven their mettle by putting
HBGary effectively out of business with one masterful hack.
Those I've spoken to in Anonymous are convinced there's something
to this. Anonymous has a proven track record with leaks, and Bank
of America has been in their crosshairs since they cut off [12]
payments to Wikileaks in December. If it's real, it could be big.
Keep your eye on anonleaks.ch: It should hit Monday.
We urge readers to check into
http://hbgary.anonleaks.ch/
[13] first thing Monday - after all this is the portal that
released the original damning HBGary evidence, and brought down
the firm within weeks. If it can do the same with Bank of America,
Monday may just soon be a national holiday.
h/t MM
BAC Bad Bank Bank of America GMAC
Source URL:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hacker-collective-anonymous-release-documents-proving-bank-america-committed-fraud-monday
Links:
[1]
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_12/b4220066790741.htm
[2]
twitter operationleaks
[3]
what does anonymous have on bank of america
[4]
bofa segregates almost half its mortgages into bad bank under
laughlin
[5]
wikileaks next target big us bank
[6]
Balboa pic
[7]
bank of america suck
[8]
http://anonleaks.ch/
[9]
anonymous hackers launch wikileaks for normal people
[10]
12 hackers
[11]
hbgary federals aaron barr resigns after anonymous hack
scandal
[12]
bank of america cuts off wikileaks
[13]
http://hbgary.anonleaks.ch/
Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks
Prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
Operation Leakspin, Operation Payback and Operation Avenge Assange -- each outlining different tactics to demonstrate their support. Anonymous is a by-product of the political freedoms we often take for granted.
Legal experts and good-government advocates say taking a hard-line
approach to leaks has a chilling effect on whistleblowers, who
fear harsh legal reprisals if they dare to speak up. It is not a
crime to shine a light on the inner workings of government
especially when there are measures that could protect the nation's
interests without hauling journalists into court and government
officials off to jail. Government Accountability demands that
Freedom of the Press deals with leaks that embarrass the
government ie: U.S. intelligence.
Double Standard Power Trip
Top White House and administration officials give unauthorized
information to Washington reporters almost daily, So why do these
same authorities bully rank-and-file employees who get caught
doing the same thing. Top officials frequently leak classified
information and nothing happens to them. Daniel Ellsberg, a true
patriot handed the Pentagon's top-secret assessment of the Vietnam
War to New York Times reporters 40 years ago, and supports Julian
Assange as we all should. No one investigated classified leaks to
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for the books he has written
on war policy under both recent White Houses. POLITICO reported
last year that Woodward sometimes arrived for official interviews
carrying classified maps. If you don't support Army Private
Bradley Manning, National Security Agency official Thomas Drake,
Central Intelligence Agency officer Jeffrey Sterling, and
mainstream journalists like Times reporter James Risen, YOU MIGHT
BE THE NEXT TARGET FOR PROSECUTION.
Interesting look at Anonymous
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/11/anonymous-behind-the-mask
Another interesting look:
http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/The_Chanology_Experiments
WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty
<
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/nda-wikileaks/
>
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now makes his associates sign a
draconian nondisclosure agreement that, among other things,
asserts that the organizations huge trove of leaked material is
solely the property of WikiLeaks, according to a report Wednesday.
You accept and agree that the information disclosed, or to be
disclosed to you pursuant to this agreement is, by its nature,
valuable proprietary commercial information, the agreement reads,
the misuse or unauthorized disclosure of which would be likely to
cause us considerable damage.
The confidentiality agreement (.pdf), revealed by the New
Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds nearly
$20 million on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the
organizations unpublished material. The figure is based on a
typical open-market valuation of WikiLeaks collection, the
agreement claims.
Interestingly, the agreement warns that any breach is likely to
cause WikiLeaks to lose the opportunity to sell the information to
other news broadcasters and publishers.
WikiLeaks is not known to have sold any of its leaked material,
though Assange has discussed the possibility in the past. The
organization announced in 2008 that it was auctioning off early
access to thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, but the auction ultimately fell
apart.
Also protected by the agreement is the fact and content of this
agreement and all newsworthy information relating to the workings
of WikiLeaks. The New Statesmans copy is unsigned, so whoever
leaked it might be safe from legal action by WikiLeaks.
Confirmation that John Young saw the rotten core of WikiLeaks
early on...
WHO ARE THE
BASTARD
KOCh BROTHERS
#
Operation Payback.
When you lose your fear you will be willing to stand up and fight using your Non Violent Strategy. History proves this is when all Tyrants like the Koch Brothers and other Regimes Crumble!!
HBGARY, MORGAN STANLEY, KOCH BROTHERS, BANK OF AMERICA
Anonymous' Operation Payback.
Some ideas are better than others. Whacking a hornet's nest isn't.
Youtube
Morgan Stanley was hit by a “very sensitive” breach to its network
by the same attackers who penetrated computer systems maintained
by Google and dozens of other companies, according to leaked
emails reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The
emails came from California-based HBGary
, which suffered a major compromise of its own at the hands of
hackers from
Anonymous
. After being hired by Morgan Stanley in 2010, HBGary members
found that the world's top merger adviser fell prey to the
so-called Aurora hacks, which siphoned source code and other
sensitive data from the victim companies over a period of many
months.
"They were hit hard by the real Aurora attacks (not the crap in
the news)," Phil Wallisch, a senior security engineer at HBGary,
wrote in one email.
In a May 10 email to HBGary President Penny Leavy-Hoglund,
Wallisch wrote: "They have given me access to a very sensitive
report on their Aurora experience. I will honor their wishes about
not sharing the info with anyone, but the good news is that I have
some great ideas for our
final reports." [...]
Dan Goodin in San Francisco 1st March 2011
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/01/morgan_stanley_aurora_attacks
The RSA security conference took place February 14-18 in San
Francisco, and malware response company HBGary planned on a big
announcement.
Fri Feb 25, 2011
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2011/02/our-anonymous-hbgary-coverage-on-colbert-report.ar
The firm was about to unveil a new appliance called "
Razor,
" a specialized computer plugged into corporate networks that
could scan company computers for viruses, rootkits, and custom
malware even malicious code that had never been seen before.
Razor "captures all executable code within the Windows operating
system and running programs that can be found in physical memory,"
said HBGary, and it then "'detonates' these captured files within
a virtual machine and performs extremely low level tracing of all
instructions." Certain behaviorsrather than confirmed
signatureswould suggest the presence of malware inside the
company.
The HBGary team headed over early to the RSA venue at the Moscone
Center in order to set up their booth on the exhibition floor.
Nerves were on edge. A week before, HBGary and related company
HBGary Federal were both infiltrated by members of the hacker
collective
Anonymous
, which was upset that HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr had compiled
a dossier of their alleged real names. In the wake of the attack,
huge batches of sensitive company e-mail had been splashed across
the 'Net. HBGary employees spent days cleaning up the electronic
mess and mending fences with customers.
On the RSA floor, a team put together the HBGary booth and
prepared for the Razor announcement. CEO Greg Hoglund prepped his
RSA talk, called "Follow the Digital Trail."
At RSA: "Anon: In it 4 the lulz..."
The HBGary team left for the night. When they returned the next
morning, the opening day of the conference, they found a sign in
their booth. It was from
Anonymous.
"We had a lot to think about," HBGary's Vice President of
Services, Jim Butterworth, told Ars. "We had just spent the
previous week trying to clean things up and get ourselves back to
normal, harden our systems, [and we] continued to hear the
telephone calls and the threatsand I will add, these are very
serious threats."
Now, with the appearance of the note in their RSA booth, the team
felt not just electronically exposed; they felt physically
threatened and stalked. "They decided to follow us to a public
place where we were to do business and make a public mockery of
our company," Butterworth said. "Our position was that we
respected RSA and our fellow vendors too much to allow this
spectacle to occur."
Instead, HBgary Inc. pulled out
of the conference. ZDNet journalist Ryan Naraine snapped a photo
from the show floor:
HBGary's withdrawal note
ZDNet The attacks continue
On Sunday, February 6, the electronic assault had begun in
earnest. As America sat down to watch the Super Bowl kickoff, five
"members" of
Anonymous
infiltrated the website of security firm HBGary Federal. They had
been probing HBGary Federal and related firm HBGary Inc. since
Saturday, but on Sunday they struck gold with an SQL injection
attack on HBGary Federal's content management system.
They quickly grabbed and decrypted user passwords from the
website, which they used to move into HBGary Federal's hosted
Google e-mail.
By the time the attack was through,
the hackTIVISTS had compromised
HBGary Federal's website
deleted its backup data
took over Greg Hoglund's rootkit.com site
and locked both companies out of their e-mail accounts by
changing the passwords.
The HBGary saga:
Anonymous
to security firm working with FBI:
"You've angered the hive"
How one security firm tracked down
Anonymous
and paid a heavy price
(Virtually) face to face: how Aaron Barr revealed himself to
Anonymous
How one security firm tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price
Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks
Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
Black ops: How HBGary wrote backdoors for the government
The exact URL used to break into hbgaryfederal.com
Anonymous vs. HBGary: the aftermath
Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
Black ops: How HBGary wrote backdoors for the government
While HBGary Federal was truly "hacked," HBGary Inc. was not;
attackers simply used existing usernames and passwords to access
key systems.
HBGary had in fact hardened its Web defenses, fully patching them
on the Thursday before the attack began in anticipation of some
unpleasantness. Butterworth told Ars that the company was able to
bring down its compromised offsite Web servers within 42 minutes
of the attack's beginning. (He also confirmed the accuracy of our
earlier exclusive report on how Anonymous penetrated the two
companies.)
Over the last week, this part of the story became well known. What
was not visible outside the hallways of HBGary's Sacramento
offices, however, was just how long the attacks continued. Indeed,
although the electronic assault stopped soon after it began, the
harassment has yet to end.
Butterworth sounded tired as he recounted the days for us when we
spoke, 17 had passed since the initial attack. Since then, HBGary
has been flooded with phone calls and voicemails of the "you
should be ashamed of yourself" type and worse; the fax machines
have been overwhelmed with Anonymous outpourings; people have been
"directly threatening our employees with extortion"; threats have
been made.
Then came RSA.
Butterworth, with a long career in military signals intelligence
and private security firms, is no stranger to the dark world of
cyberattacks, but he's used to adversaries who retreat after an
electronic strike.
Instead, he believes that
Anonymous
has "decided to continue their antics. They're in it for the
laughs this is a real funny game for them." Not content with the
damage they have inflicted, they "harass a company that's trying
to get back to work." Each time a new story about the company
appears in the press, Butterworth said that these attacks spike
again.
"Millions in damages"
Anonymous IRC channel #ophbgary
The fallout from the whole debacle endures. In the wake of the
attack, HBGary's Penny Leavy and Greg Hoglund (they are married)
entered the Anonymous IRC channel #ophbgary to plead in vain for
Greg's e-mails to stay private. (Several less relevant remarks
have been removed from the transcript for easier reading.)
<+greg> so you got my email spool too then
<&Sabu> yes greg.
<@`k> greg we got everything
<+Agamemnon> Greg, I'm curious to know if you understand
what we are about? Do you understand why we do what we do?
<+greg> you realize that releasing my email spool will cause
millions in damages to HBGary?
<@`k> yes
<+c0s> greg: another reason its not out yet.
<+Agamemnon> yes we do greg
<@`k>
greg is will be end of you :) and your company
Asked if HBGary has in fact seen a financial impact from the
Anonymous
attack, Butterworth would only say, "Time will tell." He did admit
that the hack had an impact on the company "the tainting of a
brand name, a company that has a very good product" and that
"we've received indications that folks are having second thoughts"
about working with the firm.
anonymous uses
Tor software and proxy servers
Anonymous, stumbled on a cache of e-mails involving dirty
tricks against WikiLeaks and using intelligence assets against
pro-union websites.
Without those revelations, the hack and e-mail release might have
looked far more self-interested. Anonymous protecting its mask.
Why have the attacks on HBGary Inc. continued? We spoke to people
with knowledge of the initial Anonymous hack. All have denied the
existence of continuing operations against HBGary and note that
the IRC channel used for coordination, #ophbgary, has been
shuttered
Subject: Security Problem
hope your strategy wont work and ppl of this planet will become free without beeing surpressed or monitored.
shame on you for your "business" - it is ppl like you who try to stop human revelation all in the name of allmighty america.
nice to see you failing hard and getting exposed yourself. how does it feel, suckers ?
i am looking forward to see your next fail.
greets
one of your monitored sheep that actually dont like to be monitored.
ps: please do us (the human race that is not trying to be nazis like
you) a favor and get aids and die slow and painfull,
thanks in advance.
The real impact of the attacks on Anonymous may not be felt for
months, or even years. HBGary says it is working with the
authorities on the case, and one presumes that the FBI is
interested in busting those responsible. The FBI has previously
arrested those associated with mere denial of service attacks, and
it recently executed 40 search warrants in connection with
Anonymous' Operation Payback.
In a press release regarding the search warrants, the FBI reminded
Anonymous
that "facilitating or conducting a DDoS [Distributed denial of
service] attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in
prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil
liability."
Butterworth, who touted his own (lengthy) list of advanced
security credentials during our call, told us that based on his
investigation so far, the Anonymous "operational security was not
that good they're pretty dirty." If he's right, the Anonymous
attack, so far free of consequences, might end with some serious
ones indeed.
FBI should invesitgate
Aaron Barr
, Palantir,
Berico, and HBGary Federal, Hunton & Williams
Palantir
The company was part of "
Team Themis," a group comprised of Palantir, Berico, and HBGary
Federal, which got involved with the DC law firm Hunton &
Williams. Hunton & Williams was looking for ways to help the
US Chamber of Commerce, and later a major US bank, deal with
troublesome opponents (pro-union websites and WikiLeaks,
respectively.)
As a member of Team Themis, Palantir became part of Aaron Barr's
plans to go after WikiLeaks, put pressure on commentators like
Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald, and set up a surveillance cell for
the Chamber of Commerce. No one in the e-mails that we saw
objected to any of the proposed ideas.
Palantir adopting Barr's ideas about WikiLeaks
When news of the proposals came out, Palantir said it was
horrified. Dr. Alex Karp, the company's CEO, issued a statement:
"We make data integration software that is as useful for fighting
food borne illness as it is to fighting fraud and terrorism.
Palantir does not make software that has the capability to carry
out the offensive tactics proposed by HBGary. Palantir never has
and never will condone the sort of activities recommended by
HBGary. As we have previously stated, Palantir has severed all
ties with HBGary going forward."
As we noted in our initial report on the situation, several of the
key ideas had come from
Aaron Barr
but they were quickly adopted by other team members, including
Palantir.
I asked the company for more information on why Barr's ideas had
shown up in Palantir-branded material. The company's general
counsel, Matt Long, supplied the following answer:
We did make a mistake one of a fast growing company with lots
of decentralized decision making authority. Initial results of
our ongoing internal diagnostic show that a junior engineer
allowed offensive material authored by HBGary to end up on a
slide deck with Palantir's logo. The stolen emails
conclusively show that Aaron Barr from HBGary authored the
content which was collated well past midnight for an early
morning presentation the next day.
This doesn't excuse the incident, but hopefully it brings much
needed context to a context-less email dump. That junior engineer,
a 26-year-old, has been put on leave while his actions are being
reviewed. "We should have cut ties with HBGary sooner and raised
internal concerns about this sooner," Long told me. "This is a
huge mistake for sure; we aren't making excuses. But our company
never approved hacking or carrying out dirty tricks on anyone."
As for the engineer's e-mail in which he said that the
Team Themis
project "got approval from Dr. Karp and the Board" on a new
revenue sharing plan, Long said that it was simply "classic
salesmanship ('I need to get my manager's permission for that. I
really argued hard for you and got you this deal').
In our case we don't have sales people so it is very
transparent/obvious coming from a 26-year-old engineer. Dr. Karp
and the Board did not know about the specifics of the proposal
including pricing."
Berico, one of the three companies involved with Team Themis,
initially promised a response to our questions about its handling
of the situation. The company later changed its mind and declined
to comment.
Berico
did issue one public statement back on February 11, saying that it
"does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets
American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions
reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best
companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore,
we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal."
The company added that it was "conducting a thorough internal
investigation to better understand the details of how this
situation unfolded and we will take the appropriate actions within
our company."
Aaron Barr
HBGary Federal was in the process of selling itself after the
company couldn't meet revenue projections and had difficulty
paying taxes and salaries. On January 19, Penny Leavy (the largest
single investor in HBGary Federal) suggested in an e-mail to Aaron
Barr that he give the two companies considering a purchase a set
of deadlines. Under her projected scenario, the two firms would
bid on February 4 and HBGary Federal would make a final decision
on February 7.
On February 6, Anonymous attacked.
What happened to Barr?
Anonymous loudly and angrily demanded that Penny Leavy fire him,
since his list of Anonymous names could allegedly have gotten
"innocent people" into serious trouble. Leavy made clear that
HBGary Federal was a separate company from HBGary, one in which
she owned only a 15 percent stake, and that she couldn't simply
"fire" the CEO.
Barr, too, had a stake in HBGary Federal. He couldn't just be
fired but he told Ars that
he has taken a leave of absence from the company
in order to focus on some other things.
When he finally regained control of his Twitter account last week,
Barr's first new message since the attack said just about all
there was left to say: "My deepest personal apology to all those
that were negatively affected by the release of my e-mail into the
public."
RSS
- Anonymous to security firm working with FBI: "You've angered the hive"
- How one security firm tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price
- Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks
- Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack
- Black ops: How HBGary wrote backdoors for the government
- The exact URL used to break into hbgaryfederal.com
- Anonymous vs. HBGary: the aftermath
Aaron Barr Quits Thanks to Anonymous
The embattled CEO of HBGary Federal has resigned his post three
weeks after Anonmyous hacked into the company's network and
liberated thousands of e-mail messages. The ease with which
Anonymous conducted the attack left the company that provides
security services to the federal government looking like the
pathetic loser he is.
WIKILEAKS
VS. THE
SURVEILLANCE STATE
and THE government
information control puppets:
Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, facebook, twitter
TERMS OF SERVICE:
they gave themselves the right to cancel you as soon as you
were *accused* of something ! ! !
If our government is going to continue to represent the people,
that we must have openness. Those in government must have checks
and balances on their conduct IE: REGULATIONS
This applies to corporations who have no oversight and have been
deregulated is driving government's poor conduct who want to
neutralize Wikileaks before their dirty deeds are exposed. Bank of
America is probably a big player in this, their history speaks for
itself.
Governments security is a joke and that they want to deflect
attention from their gross incompetence. Assange is not alone in
being fed up with the way our government conducts itself.
Hacking of DuPont, J&J, GE Were Google-Type Attacks That Weren't Disclosed .
Secrecy may be a reason why the dangers of the intrusions are
“underappreciated” by investors and regulators, Whitehouse said in
an interview. The FBI broke the news to executives at DuPont Co.
late last year that hackers had cracked the company's computer
networks for the second time in 12 months, according to a
confidential Dec. 9, 2010, e-mail discussing the investigation.
About a year earlier, DuPont had been hit by the same China- based
hackers who struck Google Inc. (GOOG) and unlike Google, DuPont
kept the intrusion secret, internal e-mails from cyber-security
firm
HBGary Inc
. show. As DuPont probed the incidents, executives concluded they
were the target of a campaign of industrial spying, the e-mails
show. The attacks on DuPont and on more than a dozen other
companies are discussed in about
60,000 confidential e-mails that HBGary
, hired by some of the targeted businesses, said were stolen from
it on Feb. 6 and posted on the Internet by a group of
hacker-activists known as Anonymous
. The companies attacked include Walt Disney Co. (DIS), Sony Corp.
(6758), Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric Co., the
e-mails show. “We are on the losing end of the biggest transfer of
wealth through theft and piracy in the history of the planet,”
said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who
chaired a U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence task force
on U.S. cyber security in 2010. Its classified report addressed
weaknesses in network security. A previous review of HBGary
e-mails by Bloomberg News showed hackers also stole proprietary
data from Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc,
ConocoPhillips (COP), and Marathon Oil Corp, as well as Morgan
Stanley. Atlanta-based King & Spalding LLP, the 38th biggest
law firm in the country in 2010, according to the National Law
Journal. The e-mails don't indicate what information the hackers
targeted. Among King & Spalding's practice specialties is
corporate espionage, according to the firm's website.