– Smashing stuff. Absolutely top notch. Anonymous has truly taken the stuffed shirt out of these folks. And good on them for doing it. – dennis
– Check out the two posts previous to this one: ➡ and ➡ as well.
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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.
Over the last week, I’ve talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary’s defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet.
– Please, read more… ➡
-Research thanks to Alan T.
Reading the IRC logs of a convo between anon and personnel from HBGary, I noticed two things that really stood out.
One, HBGary was hacked by a teenaged girl. Some security, Aaron. She can’t even buy beer yet, and she brought you down.
Two, Aaron selected names harvested from IRC and Facebook and called them the leaders of anonymous. These random people could have been subject to serious charges. Innocent people, being used as a pawn by Aaron Barr.
And yet, one of their complaints about anonymous retaliation was, “Think of the innocent people you’ll be hurting.” In the logs, HBGary reps refused to even address the fallout for the people on their list while totally ignoring the potential consequences for the “leaders of anonymous,” the lucky users selected from IRC and Facebook.
HBGary; selfish, self absorbed, and now pariah. Don’t mess with anonymous.