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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."
Ought to have been better prepared if you go kicking a nest full of hornets...
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.
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
To help you out: HBGary is still running. HBGary Federal is a new spin-off company started in December 2009 to try and sell "cybersecurity" products to the Feds.
If they were cybersecurity experts, ones that were worth paying for with your tax dollars, then Anonymous would not have been able to pwn their website, twitter accounts, email, ....
According to some of those recently pwned emails, the spokesperson Aaron Barr admitted to his own staff that he was deliberately provoking Anonymous, because he knew that the press was interested in anything to do with Anonymous and they'd get good publicity and possibly sales.
The money quote from Aaron's company email: But it's not about them... it's about our audience having the right impression of our capability and the competency of our research. Anonymous will do what every they can to discredit that. and they have the mic to speak because they are on Al Jazeera, ABC, CNN, etc. I am going to keep up the debate because I think it's good business, but I will be smart about my public responses.
Does that help you swing one way or the other?
Does my bum look big in this?
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)...