Slashdot Mirror
The Inner World of Gov-Sponsored White-Hat Hacking
romanval writes "Anonymous leaked emails of white-hat hacker firm HBGary shows how it develops and markets products to government agencies. From the article: 'In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge. They focused on ports—a laptop's interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two.'"
A 'White Hat' hacker is someone who aims to improve security; HBGary are aiming to take advantage of exploits in order to hack into computers, for mining personal information. They are most definitely 'Black Hat'.
Why would this qualify as "white hat"? Because they sell their solutions to corporations? Corporations are often no better than the mafia: check how well established and still active corporations helped bring Hitler to power.
What would it be called if they sold their solutions to the "legitimate" government of Saudi Arabia? Or to Hamas (who was elected as the representatives of the Palestinian people)? Would it still be "White hat"?
I propose that "White hat hacking" be reserved only to those who use their skills for the good of the community as a whole. Just my 2 cents.
~Well, it's a good damn thing they're developing these products for the government, and not like, someone we can't trust to use them responsibly.~
White-hat? Hacking doesn't automatically get a white hat just because it's done for your favorite government (or other organisation). Developing malware and rootkits destined for actual use is black hat hacking, plain and simple. HBGary did both black and white hat stuff.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Greg Hoglund is a leading expert on rootkits, and per the article it was he who did all the developement and research. If the article tells the truth, the firm sold advanced rootkits to the US government, and the latest iteration would have been one that used advanced memory management techniques to jump around in process memory and do it's thing without using any OS-managed structures, thus evading detection. I don't grok this at all, but it sounds like an advanced version of a technique I read about where the malware extracted the code from DLL files and ran things without having to go through the OS. So that part was entirely llegit, but the social networks part (which the government apparently wasn't at all interested in, presumably because they already got a contract with those Palantir guys) was evidently a catastrophe in the making.
Emotions! In your brain!
Given all the unethical and outright illegal activities that the government has been up to recently, shouldn't a hacker firm employed by the government to spy really be called professional black hats ? ( BTW, in China they're called 'patriotic hackers' ).
Told you we were just whitehat hacking all along.
Guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.
Usually when you're compromising or bypassing the security of another's system to steal or plant data it's considered black-hat, regardless of who does it.
Nowhere in the article does it mention "White-hat" hacking.... I smell bait. Flame, troll, or otherwise. Good read non the less.
They spend so much time dicking around with my laptop at airports and borders so it's not so suspicious when they also dick around with your laptop. Now if they'd just hire somebody with a clue to fondle my ports, I could get through the line much much faster.
I was gonna put quotes (") around "white hat" but I was out of space. Slashdot needs to accept longer titles.
This title for was difficult to make because the TFA has subject matter that's all over the map: Collections of 0-day unpublished exploit vectors, rootkits with keyboard loggers disguising payload as ad click tracking data, and social network tracking via bot accounts. Tough to summarize in just 50 characters.
Just because what they did may be legal, although I have my strong doubts it actually was, doesn't mean that they are not black-hat hackers. They obviously have no morals, thus they are a black-hatted.
This is, of course, not the only way in which these terms are used, and they do in fact derive from the old spaghetti western convention of good guys in white cowboy hats, and bad guys in black. Technically, HBGary in TFA was not asked to do any form of cracking, just to develop tools and strategies. These tools, of course, were obviously for government-sanctioned attacks, and would have ended up in the hands of cyber warriors / spies. In use, it would probably qualify as a black-hat operation, although ostensibly for the cause of good if the ultimate goal is to thwart terrorists (though it must be kept in mind that many terrorists believe they are on the side of good. it's a strange world).
and this hat or that i am hacker, the terms you give me or others is a joke. REAL hackers never work for the govt, those people are security people like cops. END OF STORY
It's sort of ironic that another product with the same name (Plan B) is used to get rid of unwanted 'intrusion', not promote it...
You can't handle the truth.
But look good sir, he is short and stout! Behold his handle.. and there his spout!
which is totally what she said
I'd read TFA earlier. I decided to read the discussion here to see what interesting thoughts people might have on the topic, only to find page after page of arguments about hat colors. WTF? Pedants very rarely ever add to the discussion. Their comments seem mostly intended to inflate their own sense of superiority, and sadly often derail the discussion here as so many readers seem inclined to try to prove they are smarter. I'm sure someone will post a snarky reply that I must be new here. I'm not. I learn something every day reading here. However, this has got to be one of the most vacuous discussions I've seen related to what is a technically interesting topic that deserved better.
So is it just me, or is it fucking police state of America week on Slashdot?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
A day late and a dollar short, as ever.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
No, you are a LARGE teapot. And for the sake of everyone's eyes please pull up your pants when you are outside. Get some suspenders or something.
And if you tip me over, will I not pour out?
That's his "style". Why do they let him out of "idle" section is beyond me.
Pretty soon all "editors" will concentrate more on hype than on anything else, and summaries will have all the quality and integrity of io9 posts.
Just wait and see... Soulskill is already somewhat of a samzenpus-lite.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... then I'm both the Pope and the fucking Queen of Britain.
Just not on my carpet; on my neighbors carpet if you will. I have work and guests to attend to, and he's a sorry old man-crone, not to mention poor. And I suspect he steals my newspaper on Saturdays sometimes. Just don't tell him I said that, or our many affairs and conspiracies will go sour.
Emotions! In your brain!
If HBGary was doing this to help the people they were hacking, then they are white hat.
But the were doing it to destroy the people they were hacking, so they were black hat.
This must be that Gary's Mod I've seen on Steam.
Funny, my Thinkpad does.
In my opinion, the best description of the differences between these three classes of hackers is the following:
White hat: They will only use their knowledge for defensive capabilities. Creating a new virus in a lab setting that is only used to improve mitigation techniques would still be defensive measure.
Gray hat: They will do offensive hacking, but only when they feel it is for a moral purpose. Breaking into a database or website to track down "bad" people is a great example of moral ambiguity that falls into the gray category.
Black hat: They will break things for fun and profit.
If you accept these definitions, the actions described in the article are definitely not white hat. As a matter of fact, if you actually RTFA the title is "Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government" I did not see any mention of white hat in the article.
Aside from the poor choice of words in the /. headline, I don't see the big deal. I did not see anything outside what I would assume is normal.
I thought the coolest insight was how Greg Hoglund does some of his research.
so the sane and Windows-free among us are safe from these underhand gubmint sponsored tactics. Anyone?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I think lots of laptops available now have almost all those ports...?
He was just ahead of his time. Now, honesty is a vice and expediency is a virtue.
White hats don't break the law. If it's legal then it's okay.
Grey hats break some laws, but only to do their jobs and not any really important laws.
Black hats will use any means necessary, including abuse of human rights and breaking the law.
The government is the one who invented this white hat black hat division.
White hats are the hackers who refuse to break the law. They can write offensive programs, they can be investigators, they can hack terrorists, because they have a search warrant and it's not illegal.
Grey hats are the hackers who will break the law in the name of research, science, security and or improvement. They wont break just any law, but the minor laws that nobody will arrest them for.
Black hats will break any and every law because they don't care about laws.
So the difference between the hats are their fear of or respect for the law. This would make HBGaryFederal white hats unless you can show they didn't have a search warrant. If they are government contractors with permission from the FBI or whomever then they had a search warrant and were not breaking the law. In essence they are cyber cops.
The White Hat and Black Hat divide was invented entirely by and for the government so that the government could categorize the hacker community. In essence the only difference between White Hat and Black Hat is that the White Hat follows the law when conducting their hacks. Despite what you think, the federal government had legal authority under the patriot act and other previsions to wiretap. The government still can get a search warrant and once a search warrant is obtained then any group of contractors can be hired to execute the search warrant.
If you break the law period, you're a Black Hat.
If you follow the law period, you're a White Hat.
What HBGaryFederal did was not against the law. If they were contractors for federal agencies, they have the authority of the FBI which means they have the legal authority to do these types of searches.
I don't necessarily like it. The Patriot Act and many other Bush era laws were set in place that we don't like. But the law specifically says the government can do practically anything it wants to us in a time of war. The US is technically in war time, and the government has war powers, if the government deems anyone an enemy combatant, a terror suspect or anything like that, they can get a warrant to conduct a search which could include wiretapping, or hacking.
The problem I have is when the law is clearly broken. It's unknown from the information in those emails whether or not HBGaryFederal broke any laws but it does not seem that they did.
If HBGaryFederal is Black Hat and working in the interest of protecting the security of the US Government, then the US Government is also Black Hat. Correct?
Which is why if they give themselves permission to wiretap and hack all of our computers and networks, they have the permission.
The FCC gave them that legal authority a long time ago.
Your countries espionage White hats would be other countries Black Hats as there are always many more other countries and you would also consider other countries White Hat espionage agents as Black Hats, the numbers are definitely for Black Hats as the appropriate nomenclature.
Time of course to point out the stupid. You also would be giving away dangerous technology that once discovered could and would be used against you. Now to make that even worse, you can not defend against the attack without alerting others to it thus defeating it's value, what can you say but, "the stupid, oh my God, it burns". So not only Black hats but really bloody stupid Black Hats.
The White Hats can and must aggressively hack. This is the only way they can hack Al Qaeda.
I find it funny this site at one time will claim they can't wait for the US Cyber Command and wants the USA to win the Cyber War, but then gets angry at HBGaryFederal. I don't agree with or understand why HBGaryFederal was hacking American citizens and in specific hacking some of the people they chose, but I also am not President Obama.
Before we judge what they were doing, we ought to wait until the full story comes out. According to definition they are the US White Hat Cyber Army. They hack Al Qaeda. They hack terrorists. They hack some really bad guys, but they also hack Wikileak supporters and Glenn Greenwald.
I don't understand why they'd hack these groups, but I'd assume it would have to do with counter espionage or counter intelligence. It is probably in the interest of US national security, whether we like it or not. Obama probably authorized the whole thing, or the directors of the agencies, so it is what it is. It's just like if the generals told the troops to bomb a mosque, they might not like it but there could be terrorists in the mosque so they bomb it anyway. I'm sure HBGaryFederal's employees were given the impression either by the government or by the people within their company with the connections to government and security clearances that they were acting in the interest of US national security and saving the world etc.
Honestly I do not know what they were told, but don't underestimate the impact or influence of a bunch of generals, agency directors, former government officials, on some low level techies. They probably made these people feel important, probably gave them a mission of some sort, something like mission impossible or Sneakers. It's just they apparently fucked it up.
The ego of Aaron Barr caused this. He decided to go to the media and announce that he had dirt on Anonymous. He decided to make contact with Anonymous. Why on earth would he make contact with them? They'd never have found out who he was or what HBGaryFederal was if he hadn't made contact.