FORBES. HBGary's nemesis is a '16 year-old schoolgirl' State of security operations Forbes has bagged an interview with the "teenage girl" who supposedly played a key role in hacking security firm HBGary on behalf of Anonymous.
Event: AHCS Speaker Series: Gabriella Coleman "Geek Politics and Anonymous: From the Offensive Internet to Human Rights Activism" ZDNet - HBGary withdraws from RSA. The Guardian - US sec. firms planned to attack WL. The hacker collective Anonymous claims to have unearthed proposals by a consortium of US security firms to attack WikiLeaks, ahead of reportedly planned disclosures about the Bank of America.
Leaked emails apparently suggest that three private security firms – HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies – pitched a plan to undermine the whistleblowers' site to a law firm which has represented the Bank of America. BoA, the largest US bank, is thought to be the next target of WikiLeaks releases. Anonymous began releasing tens of thousands of emails sent by HBGary Federal late last week, after the loose-knit "hacktivist" group attacked the security firm's computer systems. Aaron Barr, the company's chief executive, was targeted by Anonymous following a newspaper interview in which he claimed to be able to expose senior members of the shadowy internet collective. "Anonymous should be regarded as the criminal group it is," Leavy told a security conference in San Francisco. Alternet - Malware Hacking to Discredit. Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed that lawyers representing the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful trade associations for large corporations like ExxonMobil and CitiGroup, had solicited a proposal from a set of military contractors to develop a surreptitious campaign to attack the Chamber’s political opponents, including ThinkProgress, the Change to Win labor coalition, SEIU, StopTheChamber.com, MoveOn.org, U.S. Chamber Watch and others. The lawyers from the Chamber’s longtime law firm Hunton and Williams had been compiling their own data set on some of these targets. Ars technica - The inside story of the hack. It has been an embarrassing week for security firm HBGary and its HBGary Federal offshoot.
HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year. When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published. Anonymous: more than kids HBGary and HBGary Federal position themselves as experts in computer security. Time for an injection. The H security - Anon exposes US security company.
HBGary Federal quits RSA over Anonymous WikiLeaks email. Computerworld - HBGary Federal quits RSA. WL Central - HBG Tries 2 Protect US from Anon. (update below) HBGary Federal, provider of classified cybersecurity services to the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and other US government agencies, has opted over the past months to go to war with the group of WikiLeaks supporters known as Anonymous.
The Tech Herald reported today on HBGary Federal and two other data intelligence firms “strategic plan” for an attack against WikiLeaks. The company is considered to be “a leading provider of best-in-class threat intelligence solutions for government agencies and Fortune 500 organizations.” It provides "enhanced threat intelligence" so "the federal government can better protect our national cyber infrastructure. " Daily Kos - Anon pwns HBGary. Like Barr's previous statements to FT, the entirety of his research is not only terrible, but in many cases less informative than is the public record.
The entry on me, for instance, is entirely inaccurate despite the fact that I have not been a clandestine participant since coming out of the closet months ago. As noted by Bernard Keane, the situation is rather hilarious. Ars Technica - Face to face. Aaron Barr, CEO of security company HBGary Federal, spent the month of January trying to uncover the real identities of the hacker collective Anonymous—only to end with his company website knocked offline, his e-mails stolen, 1TB of backups deleted, and his personal iPad wiped when Anonymous found out.
Our lengthy investigation of that story generated such interest that we wanted to flesh out one compelling facet of the story in even more detail. In a sea of technical jargon, social media analysis, and digital detective work, it stands out as a truly human moment, when Barr revealed himself to Anonymous and dialogued directly with senior leaders and "members" of the group.
The encounter began on February 5. Barr had managed to get his work written up in a Financial Times story the day before, and now strange traffic was pouring in to HBGary Federal. Barr's apparent motives were multiple: to mitigate any revenge upon his company, but also to meet as equals with his hacker subjects. Gawker - Anonleaks. NYT - Hackers Reveal Offers 2 Spy.
This week, hackers said they had penetrated the computers of HBGary Federal, a security company that sells investigative services to corporations, and posted tens of thousands of what appear to be its internal company e-mails on the Internet.
The documents appear to include pitches for unseemly ways to undermine adversaries of and the , like doing background research on their critics and then distributing fake documents to embarrass them. The bank and the chamber do not appear to have directly solicited the spylike services of HBGary Federal. Rather, HBGary Federal offered to do the work for Hunton & Williams, a corporate law firm that has represented them. A Hunton & Williams spokesman did not comment. Crikey - I confess. On the weekend, a report appeared in the Financial Times (paywalled, but carelessly copied at Pastebin) on the internet group Anonymous, about which I’ve written a couple of pieces of late.
According to the report, senior members of Anonymous face arrest because “they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications.” The source of the claim was former US Navy cryptographer Aaron Barr of computer security company HB Gary Federal. Barr claimed to the FT that he had “penetrated” Anonymous – a choice of language guaranteed to induce hysterics at 4chan – and that, in the words of the journalist, “key Anonymous figures” were “fretting”. It was only near the end of the piece that Barr’s claims began to sound a bit odd. Oh and by the way, methodological note for MSM journalists: for once you’re actually able to use the word “hacked”, which doesn’t mean participating in a DDOS attack Among the names is my own. Wired - Heavy price.
Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous.
The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code. In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project. “They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!”
But had he? “We are kind of pissed at him right now” Aaron Barr Barr’s “pwning” meant finding out the names and addresses of the top Anonymous leadership. “At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls,” he wrote in an internal e-mail. Indeed, publicity was the plan.