HBGary Federal Hacked By Anonymous

An anonymous reader writes "As the coin was tossed to kick off Superbowl XLV, Anonymous unleashed their anger at a security firm who had been investigating their membership. HBGary Federal had been working on unmasking their identities in cooperation with an FBI investigation into the attacks against companies who were cutting off WikiLeaks access and financing. Unlike the DDoS attacks for which Anonymous has made headlines in recent months, this incident involved true hacking skills."

Comments

hack

[Anonymous Coward]

And by true hacking, we mean true cracking.

Re:hack

[Anonymous Coward]

And by true cracking, we mean true felony raps. Enjoy life in prison idiots.

Re:hack

[93 Escort Wagon]

And by true hacking, we mean true cracking.

Languages are fluid, and you can't prevent it from happening. You've already lost this battle.

Re:hack

[Myopic]

Agreed. In fact, this battle was lost before it began. The world had settled on the word "hacker" before the word "cracker" was invented. Plus, "cracker" is a racial slur. There's even a damn movie called "Hackers". It's long since time to let it go.

Well, that'll be helpful

[Burb]

Another mature contribution from those grown-ups at Anonymous.

Re:Well, that'll be helpful

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Yeah, they should have been doing renditions to Egypt of those responsible, like grown-ups do.

Re:Well, that'll be helpful

[Burb]

The only place where two wrongs make a right is boolean algebra. Revenge/retaliation just continues a cycle of aggression and destruction. I'm hardly happy about extraordinary rendition either. Whatever Anonymous' valid claims may be, this does nothing for their cause, except to give themselves hugely negative publicity. Way to go, generate sympathy for those you are against... sheesh.

Re:Well, that'll be helpful

[copponex]

Defacing a website and causing data loss is the same thing as torturing someone to death, or subverting democracy to keep an autocratic regime in power? That's news to anyone with an elementary understanding of ethics.

Re:Well, that'll be helpful

[TerranFury]

Helpful to whom? To you? To me? To the company which was targeted? To anons? To cops?

Helpful to anon and their cause. The problem is that this isn't.

Fucking around on a telecommunications network is not an exercise of real power. All it does is demonstrate how truly impotent Anonymous really is, while simultaneously giving those who do have real power excuses to further restrict use.

Ultimately, this is a political issue. The little guy wins at politics only through sheer force of numbers. That means being popular. I understand that "popular" is a word that Anon's members probably have a hard time identifying with, but it's one they really need to take and use for their own if they want to achieve their goals.

Anonymous needs to be appealing. It needs to be photogenic. People should want to have sex with it. That's how the world works: People do not clearly separate moral principles, from political goals, from personal desires, from sexual urges, from the respect of their peers. Study after study has shown, for instance, that people with more attractive faces are judged to be more honest; "beauty is good" is wired into our brains. When was the last time you saw a balding man, or a short man, elected president? Anonymous will not succeed if it looks like a bunch of smelly nerds. It needs a better image. People need to like them.

Assange, the paranoid, has an uphill battle; he is not a naturally likeable person. But he did one smart thing: When he found himself in the limelight, he got a haircut and bought a suit. That's what you do.

In politics, image is everything. Do you know how George Washington got the command of the Continental Army? He showed up to the Congress wearing his militia uniform -- and he was tall. Nevermind that he had no military experience of note; he looked the part. Why are actors -- unqualified in policy and unpracticed in analysis -- so successful at politics? Ronald Reagan, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger. They play a convincing, masculine role. People eat that shit up.

This is the game that Anonymous finds itself playing, whether it likes it or not. Image management is how you win at it.

Re:Well, that'll be helpful

[1u3hr]

Seems a perfectly reasonable response to me. HBGary tried to out members of Anonymous; exposing their private information. Anonymous returned the favour. In the arena of public opinion, Anonymous are ahead. HBGary were made fools of.

But to talk about "aggression", "destruction" is silly. Actually in BOTH CASES the only ones at risk of real harm are Anonymous. If members of Anonymous are actually tracked down, they would get chewed up by the legal system.

Sigh

[hirvonen]

Ought to have been better prepared if you go kicking a nest full of hornets...

Security is for Other people!

[Herkum01]

From the article,

HBGary was victimized by a combination of social engineering and a shared password between systems

Evidently, being a security firm means not having to following good security practices.

Ambivlance

[DoofusOfDeath]

It's hard to know how to feel about someone waging war against your own society.

Anonymous is fighting partially on behalf of Wikileaks. Wikileaks' recent releases put some sunlight on goverment/industry malfeasance, but also pointlessly harmed some diplomatic efforts by publishing unflattering personal opinions about people the US probably needs to get along with.

And the company Anonymous is going after probably helps stop real security threats that most of us would agree merit stopping; not just Cablegate-related stuff.

What a tangled mess of virtue and vice.

Re:Ambivlance

[Sarten-X]

I'm sorry, but where exactly is the virtue?

Wikileaks has done effectively nothing recently besides attack the US government. Where's all those high-finance leaks that were promised years ago? Where's the responsible redaction that every reputable journalist goes through? Where's the public editing and input that it began with? As far as I can tell, Wikileaks lost all attempt at virtue by the beginning of 2010. Since then, it's resorted to blackmail to maintain its interests, threatening to release unfiltered, uncensored information if anything happens to Julian Assange or the organization itself. Virtue, indeed.

Regardless of my opinions, Wikileaks may be worth fighting for. In that case, donate to it through any of the several channels that are still open. If they're all shut down today, wait until tomorrow and there'll be five more. Shrugging off law and order to throw rocks at companies isn't about a virtuous protest. It's a child's tantrum. What's more, it's a tantrum from children who don't dare consider that they're breaking laws with this farce of a protest. HBGary is now being attacked for investigating a criminal act. Last time I checked, breaking laws for any cause was still grounds to be arrested and put on trial. Often, it's even enough to be convicted.

Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald who, conspiracies aside, killed President Kennedy. Ruby was convicted of murder, because he killed someone. What his victim may or may not have done is irrelevant. In my opinion, every participant in a DDoS ought to face justice according to their jurisdictions. They broke laws, and have no basis to complain now that they're being caught.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if there were no outlet for protest other than a DDoS, but there are. Wikileaks' supporters could raise a billboard encouraging support of Wikileaks' mission. They could send letters to representatives and picket assemblies and courthouses. They could follow any of the myriad forms of protest that have been established and respected over the past thousand years, without breaking any laws. They could, but Anonymous won't. Anonymous is a legion of crying children. Virtue doesn't hold their interest. Mayhem does.

Re:Ambivlance

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You really have to define "your own society" in clear terms to work this little moral conundrum out...

Wikileaks, and their anonymous friends, are definitely attacking the secrecy of certain state and corporate entities that exist on American soil and/or are paid for with US taxpayer funds. Is that enough to make them "our own society"? Or does the fact that a clandestine morass of opaque state functionaries, often quite a few levels removed from anything resembling a "representative" is dubiously in line with a democratic republic make them a sort of cancerous outgrowth of "our own society"?

I'm not playing the "Well, man, it's like, all relative; because one person's hero is another's terrorist, man." card. These are real questions that, arguably, have cogent answers(albeit ones reliant on certain axiomatic assumptions that the answerer brings to the table).

Societies constantly attack themselves in order to survive: the police spend basically all their time hunting down and hauling in for trial citizens and residents whose behavior is considered to have put them against society rather than in it. Politicians constantly attack one anothers' programmes, in a process intended to produce the best or most representative outcome. Assorted NGOs and individuals constantly bring suits against one another and the state trying to redress various perceived wrongs. As with a complex multicellular organism, where killing abberant cells before they metastasize and kill you is as important a job as killing external pathogens before they kill you, the maintenance of a complex society is a constant process of defense from external enemies and(particularly for a militarily strong and geographically lucky country like the US) culling internal enemies and dangerous trends.

Unless we define "our society" more or less tautologically as "whatever society we are participating in at the moment"; it is the case that there is an ideal "our society" and an actual "the society we are doing". When the two differ too much, "our society" becomes a dead letter, used primarily for propaganda purposes by "the society we are doing". Fighting against that trend, which frequently means attacking, sometimes in accordance with the rules of "the society we are doing"(as with constitutional challenge court cases), sometimes against those rules(leaks, hacks, etc.) "the society we are doing", is a necessary part of staying reasonably in line with "our society".

It is a matter of legitimate debate whether or not Wikileaks is attacking "our society" or "the society we are actually doing", and how different those two are; but it is not a matter of trivial debate.

Re:clever!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Americans decide to peacefully toss a few sacks of tea into Boston harbor and get the entire harbor shutdown.. so they counter with even more illegal activity and a revolution that will get them even further into the shit

great plan numbnuts

Point being... if everyone on Earth was afraid to break a few laws, we'd still be under the rule of British monarchs. Thank god some people don't tuck tail and run whenever Big Brother stares in their direction.

The moral of the story...

[Assmasher]

...don't jump into the deep end if you don't know how to swim.

Line between Civil Disobedience. . .

[JSBiff]

Civil Disobedience is, as far as I know, marked by breaking unjust laws, and then *accepting the consequences* by going to jail, or whatever, to show society the unjustness of the laws, and to win sympathy to your cause.

I believe Anonymous stepped way over the line of Civil Disobedience long ago, with retaliation upon retaliation and attempting to avoid being caught. I really just have to view Anonymous as largely a group of criminals who deserve to be in jail for engaging in openly criminal activity - I can't see that laws which make it illegal to perform DDoSes against legal businesses, or to make unauthorized access to other people's computers, are fundamentally unjust.

These guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK.

Re:Line between Civil Disobedience. . .

[Rakshasa Taisab]

The myth of 'Civil Disobedience is all about getting caught' is spread by those who don't like the goals of today's civil disobedience, only those of yesterday.

Seriously, imprisonment is how you _FIGHT_ civil disobedience, and you're a moron for thinking that's somehow how you go about succeeding in changing anything.

Re:Line between Civil Disobedience. . .

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that neither Wikileaks nor Anonymous are interested in engaging in "Civil disobedience".

In the case of Wikileaks, they aren't "Civily disobedient"; because they don't actually tend to break laws. They do obviously have some contact with people who do; but their operations(while deeply unpopular) are not illegal.

Anonymous, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to do illegal things; but doesn't seem to see the point in getting punished in an effort to maintain the moral high ground. They are(aside from the ones who are in it purely for amusement), essentially engaging in the logic of retributive or revolutionary violence, albeit in bloodless and electronic forms. Irregular resistance fighters have no interest in being caught to "generate sympathy", they have an interest in inflicting damage on strategic targets, obtaining intelligence, discrediting their enemies, and then getting away(so do criminals, of course. The classification depends on the percieved legitimacy of their actions).

As you say, these guys are definitely not in the same class as the followers of Ghandi or MLK. This appears to be by design. Wikileaks, by all appearances, is interested in maintaining a legal operation to lower the cost of whistle-blowing in situations where that could open one to heavy retribution. Anonymous, while too nebulous to have a single agenda, consists of a sort of core that has embraced the logic of violent(but bloodless) direct action, along with a cloud of recreational me-toos who participate in some of the more trivial ops.

Whether you think that this is good, bad, or just a matter of style is a different question; but it would appear that they are not aiming at "Civil disobedience"(having judged it as either too personally costly, too ineffective, or perhaps both)...

Good guys and bad guys

[Anonymous Coward]

HBGary investigates and attempts to infiltrate Anonymous:Good guys just doin' their jobs.
Anonymous investigates and succeeds in infiltrating HBGary: Criminals... sick sick criminals.

Re:clever!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a label, not an entity, then how can it have "members"?

I don't know why people act as if "Anonymous" is a new thing. It's not. It's just a present-day version of something ancient - the lynch mob. The mob doesn't think, the mob doesn't consider, the mob just destroys. The mob is the barbarian horde burning down civilisation.

For a historical example of an earlier "Anonymous", think about the KKK. Just why did they wear those white hoods? The answer is easy. They did it to be "Anonymous", because if you are "Anonymous", you are released from the obligation to be a civilised human. You do what you like without consequence, so why not lynch a few negroes before they get uppity?

As XKCD says, "Anonymity + Audience = Asshole". Now, that's "Anonymous".

Re:Herp derp

[eyrieowl]

It's amazing how many people don't understand this. "Anonymous" is as smart or as dumb as whichever person wants to ascribe their current actions to anonymous. And the more you have a "fight against anonymous", the more you make it real. It's like a self-fulfilling fiction...someone makes it up, people hear about it, decide they want to be a part of it, and make it real, even though it was never real to begin with. Also.