'Anonymous' Hacker Group Teaches Shady Cyber-Security Companies a Lesson They'll Never Forget

[Joanne98]

Aaron Barr must feel like he's wearing clown shoes.

Shortly after the overreaching CEO of Sacramento's so-called cybersecurity outfit, HBGary Federal, assembled an online attack plan against pro-Wikileaks supporters like Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald and prematurely bragged about "pwning" the upstart hacker collective Anonymous privately to his employees and publicly to the Financial Times, Anonymous quickly retaliated by raiding his drives, releasing 40,000 HBGary Federal emails, remotely wiping his iPad and engendering a scathing public disconnection from those who have known and employed him. Evidently, if you fuck with the Internet bull, you still get the real-time horns.

"Rarely in the history of the cybersecurity industry has a company become so toxic so quickly as HBGary Federal," Andy Greenberg blogged Feb. 15 for Forbes' Firewall column. "Over the last week, many of the firm’s closest partners and largest clients have cut ties with the Sacramento start-up. And now it’s canceled all public appearances by its executives at the industry’s biggest conference in the hopes of ducking a scandal that seems to grow daily as more of its questionable practices come to light."

Competitive Intelligence, Rampant Idiocy

Of course, HBGary and Barr are tiny potatoes, especially for the code-savvy web heads of Anonymous, which is why his shamed mug has lately been making the media rounds. In fact, the finest breakdown of Barr and HBGary's conspiratorial plan has taken shape in Ars Technica's exhaustive spook farce, "Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down Wikileaks," which pegged Barr as "The Man Who Knew Too Little" as a parting pop-cult stab.

But Forbes is fooling itself, and you, if it really believes that Barr and HBGary are simply rogue information agents engaging in "questionable practices." In the insidious world of officially sanctioned hacking -- also known as "cybersecurity" or "competitive intelligence," the preferred corporate nomenclature -- Barr and HBGary's expendable presence extends from the U.S. Department of Justice and the well-connected legal monolith Hunton & Williams to the corrupt finance titans of Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. They have all been swept up in HBGary's discredited wake, as they try to distance themselves from what was basically a routine disinformation campaign to hack and discredit transparency champs like Wikileaks and Anonymous, whose startling disclosures have rocked the previously airtight machinery of the political and economic powers-that-be.

http://www.alternet.org/media/149943/%27anonymous%27_hacker_group_teaches_shady_cyber-security_companies_a_lesson_they%27ll_never_forget_/

[ixion]

1. good read k/r

[disillusioned73]

2. K&Rec... for Anonymous

:dem:

[starroute]

3. It's the privatization of Cointelpro

Much of what is most dispiriting in our society these days can be traced back to CIA and FBI methods of the 50s and 60s that have been taken up by private parties -- not only the dirty tricksters of the right but also the corporations.

The Chamber of Commerce, for example, has made extensive use of the old CIA trick of false front organizations -- both supposed citizens groups demanding tort reform or free trade agreements or whatever their issue of the day is and covertly Chamber-sponsored newspapers.

Now we're seeing that the techniques extend even to messing with the lives and reputations of their critics in the manner of the FBI's Cointelpro of 1956-71. Not that the government connections to that sort of thing have ended, but it seems to be private groups that are making the bulk of the effort -- and taking the blame when things go off the rails.

It would be nice to see some serious research on all these private security companies -- who they're dealing with, who's on their board of directors, what larger companies are buying them out. I know that sort of information isn't easily come by, but there's a lot that can be data-mined out of business news and similar sources. And if they're doing it to us, we absolutely need to do it to them.

[MasonJar]

4. I hope this thwarts to some extent the officious use of cyberspace to

deter democracy and enhances the use of the internet by those trying to keep us truly free. I hope this does not lead to more rules against free use of the internet. If it does, we, the people, must protest in large numbers. I'm not very good at internet use, but others are, and I want their good work to continue. Our democracy is more at risk today than it ever has been. No more corporations and government agencies in league against the people. That trend must be stopped.

[santamargarita]

5. Love it