Anonymous Breaches Another US Defense Contractor

JohnBert sends this excerpt from and IDG report: "The politically oriented hacking group Anonymous has released 1GB of what it says are private e-mails and documents from an executive of a U.S. defense company that sells unmanned aerial vehicles to police and the U.S. military. The documents were publicized in a post on Pastebin, with links leading to the actual material on another website. The material purportedly belongs to Richard Garcia, a senior vice president at Vanguard who was a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent for 25 years. Anonymous took special delight in the breach, as Garcia is director of InfraGard, an organization that liaises between private sector companies and the FBI. A group affiliated with Anonymous called LulzSecurity, or LulzSec, breached and defaced one of InfraGard's websites belonging to its Atlanta chapter in June."

Comments

Why?

[i kan reed]

One thing that I've increasingly lost track of is why people would put themselves in so much risk to attack these organizatoins. The pathos reminds me of suicide bombers, throwing their own lives away to attack a group they don't like. What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.

Re:Why?

[Opportunist]

Ya know, George Washington wasn't really starving either...

Re:Why?

[TehNoobTrumpet]

They do it because they think it's funny. For the lulz, or whatnot. I certainly see the humour in a bunch of mostly inexperienced people cracking into the data of a security firm. If legal action was taken against individuals involved, I wouldn't be able to guess if any future attacks would be happening.

Re:Why?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that most of anonymous/lulzsec score low on the religious convictions metric; but they probably score quite high on some combination of 'feeling of invulnerability/untraceability'(whether well founded or not) and 'political conviction that going down the road of myriad sinister quasi-private spooks is a bad thing'...

You don't actually have to be an impoverished nutjob clinging to the crudest flavors of some barbarous Abrahamic death-cult to take ideologically motivated risks.

Re:Why?

[couchslug]

That's the only way left so expect it to become "normal". Peaceful change won't happen so anyone wanting to fight must do so under less-traditional conditions using less-traditional methods.

When an opponent has overwhelming conventional forces, the only to negate that deterrence is to refuse to be deterred.

Food for thought:
This is the least expensive way to fight. The effort to PRESERVE ones troops can become a handicap.

Re:Why?

[JoshuaZ]

What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.

Actually, many of the suicide bombers don't have crippling poverty. They are more likely to be literate and have college degrees than the general populations from which they spring. One fact that might be particularly interesting to Slashdot is that there's a disproportionate number of terrorists who are engineers. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html and http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers. There's an associated idea known as the Salem Hypothesis which is the observation that in the US, anti-evolution proponents with advanced degrees are disproportionately engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis). Engineers in the United States are also more politically conservative and religious than scientists. There's something weird going on here. But regardless, attributing "crippling poverty" as a major part of why people engage in suicide bombing seems to be off.

Re:Why?

[AHuxley]

People in 1940's-90's Eastern Europe risked loss of work, jail time i.e. "throwing their own lives away" for telling jokes or joining a peace groups, asking questions about loved ones, handing out a pamphlet...
With Romas/COIN now Odyssey - peace group is joke on you.

Re:Why?

[obarthelemy]

Actually, they are performing a service for the community: I'd much rather have security loopholes exposed in peacetime (well, relative peace) by Anonymous et seq. than exploited by more shadowy organizations and/or governments, especially by surprise during a serious war.

Re:Why?

[drobety]

I lose track of how strapping dynamite sticks around your torso to kill people and blow up stuff is the same as anonymously (i.e. NO intention of being caught I'm sure) and giddily hacking into a web site and releasing information -- which might or might not be of public interest.

Re:Why?

[i kan reed]

Yes, that's absolutely true, but washington was an aristocrat, who already had power, authority, and wealth. The founding fathers parallel doesn't work well either, beause that had some underlying similarity to a coup. There was a power structure in the colonies that was fuctionally(by way of distance) independent of the government, and thus ripe for rebellion. I honestly don't think there's ever been a non-fictional organization with the same nature as anonymous.

Re:Why?

[SuricouRaven]

Just throwing out a wild guess with no evidence behind it, but could it be because engineers are less able to hold simutainous contradictory beliefs? Most religious believers have to some extent an ability to ignore large parts of their holy book - they can believe that all nonbelievers are going to burn in hell while simutainously advocating religious freedom for all, as an example. They can ignore the sections of the book that command the stoning of adulterers. They can talk about the sacredness of the one-man-one-woman marriage while paying no attention to the frequent polygamous marriages of the old testament that God endorsed. Engineers are trained to think in black and white - either a fact is true, or it isn't. It can't be true while you are in the church and false as soon as you step out the doors. So when they read the bit where the holy book says to destroy those who worship at false idols, that is exactly what they do.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying Anonymous are funded by a government or organization to attack servers is like saying hippies were funded by a government or terrorists to get together and smoke pot.

Anon is a culture. It's people who stand for some principles and who are willing to defend these principles. They don't necessarily ALL share the same principles, just like all hippies did not smoke pot, but in general they have a lot in common, hence why they get together.
Anyone can opt in and out of Anon at any time. You don't need much money to start hacking. You don't need to be an expert either. You can just hang around on websites where 'members' of Anon hang around too, get to know some of them, then plot an attack together.

There is no evidence to suggest Anon works for anyone, and moreover Anon has no need to be guided by a bigger group. They don't need money, they don't need help selecting targets. I'm not saying a government can't 'infiltrate' Anon (i.e. pretend to be just another average Anon guy) and suggest a few targets, hoping others will follow, but if such a group could select the majority of Anon's targets in this fashion, then that group would necessarily compose the majority off Anon. In essence, that group would be Anon.
The USA need to realize something: every government is not out to get them. And if these attacks were organized by one of the USA's enemies, like Iran, then they would not hack for e-mails, they'd go for information on how to build weapons. The USA also need to realize that they are now a tyranny, that they are comparable to Nazi Germany, and that this is necessarily going to piss people off and make them want to resist somehow. People have always resisted oppression, and this is no different.

It's also sad that when Americans see Arabs take arms against their own government, Americans immediately call it a revolution against tyranny. But when the same thing happens in the USA, except instead of an armed conflict it's an electronic one (i.e. it is much less violent), Americans call it terrorism or vigilantism.

Re:Why?

[Mr. Freeman]

It has nothing to do with luck. All the script kiddies in the world won't be able to get into a server unless it hasn't been patched in 5 years or the root password is "password".
Lulzsec, anonymous, etc. are all structured the same way. There's a huge group of extremely vocal script kiddies and a very small group of people who actually know what they're doing. The script kiddies are the ones running tools like LOIC to ddos websites and making statements to the press. This serves little purpose except to distract everyone from what the real hackers are doing. These are the ones that get arrested because even the most incompetent investigator can figure out who is sending a bajillion HTTP requests to a web server.

The people who actually know what they're doing don't get caught because, well, they know what they're doing. These people take the time to research their target, identify possible methods of attack, and then plan what they're going to do. They don't just attempt to break into random servers with whatever the vulnerability of the month happens to be and then somehow stumble across a metric shitload of confidential information.

Re:Why?

[cavreader]

"The USA also need to realize that they are now a tyranny, that they are comparable to Nazi Germany, and that this is necessarily going to piss people off and make them want to resist somehow. People have always resisted oppression, and this is no different." You are a fucking idiot. Your moral equivalency arguments denigrate and minimize the true horrors that existed during the Nazi era as well as the atrocities taking place across the world today. We have already reached the point where people honestly believe that Gaza and the West Bank mimic the conditions of Auschwitz death camps and ethnic cleansing is taking place. Ethnic cleansing is supposed to reduce the population of the target group but the Palestinians have increased their population 5 fold over the past 20 years. If ethnic cleansing is happening the perpetrators need a new washing machine. The US is called fascist and totalitarian which lets the truly totalitarian governments in the world off the hook for the atrocities they commit on a daily basis. Atrocities they do not even attempt to hide while telling anyone who complains to fuck off and mind their own business. The US has been and still is the country that the people living under true tyranny go to extremes to migrate to. Last time I checked there were no US military tanks rolling down main street threatening people with arrest and death because they want to openly state an opinion on the government. I have not seen any online bloggers or activists being arrested or prevented from publishing their opinions complain about the government.I have mot seen or heard of people being arrested in the middle of the night and made to disappear. Sadly you are not alone is creating this phenomenon of redefining history and using extreme moral equivalency, absurd conspiracy theories, and total ignorance of what the word tyranny actually means to support your short sighted and often ridicules opinions of society. The reason there is not an armed uprising in the US is because the media and people like yourself judge the entire country on the small minority of extremists on all sides of the political spectrum Any success that ANON and similar groups have achieved is not because of any technical genius on their part it is because of sloppy system admin on the sites being attacked. ANON has only exploited known vulnerabilities that have been patched for over a year. If they were really smart they would realize that hunting them down is child's play for groups like the NSA no matter how many proxies or data encryption keys they hide behind. So far they have just not been worth the effort. If the US was a tyranny these guys would already be either in jail or dead. Investigate what happens to people caught creating online vandalism or complaining about their government in countries like Iran, Syria, and N. Korea.

Re:Why?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

AC is right! Here's the corrected statement:

So Anonymous == Founding Fathers?

Re:Why?

[diersing]

While I agree they are of the well-educated variety, what makes you think they are setup or funded by a terrorist organization or government?

Their objectives don't seem consistent with those of terrorists and if funded by a government, I would think they'd be keeping a much lower profile. They seem to me to be exactly what they advertise to be, hacktivists.

Most of their targets (with any group that hides it's identity, you'll have rogues) have an easily identifiable reason/policy that would draw the ire of reasonably-minded people (PayPay stopping Wikileaks payments, Facebook's privacy practices, and BART's shooting/cell phone blocking come to mind). I just don't see the benefit of terrorists or a foreign government making those topics their focus for covert attacks.

Re:Why?

[lennier]

Just throwing out a wild guess with no evidence behind it, but could it be because engineers are less able to hold simutainous contradictory beliefs?

It might also be because in their day to day jobs, engineers are actively pitted against the forces of evolution, which tend more to be destructive than creative in their sphere of experience. They use their hearts and minds to build stuff, and random undirected change does its best to knock it down. Perhaps that background makes one less likely to assume that random undirected change on its own could do better than what smarth humans are trained and employed to do - otherwise, why do engineers have a job?

I was under the impression

[ccny_anderson]

that Anonymous as a collective whole viewed LulzSec as an inferior group, and now they're being listed as affiliates? I'm sure there are some crossovers between the group but as a whole I don't think they much care for each other...

ORLY?

[Legion303]

"The politically oriented hacking group Anonymous"

Hey, guess how long it took me to realize TFA had zero credibility?

Executive != contractor

[Baloroth]

It's one thing to breach the private emails and documents of an individual, even if he is an exec with a major defense contractor. Breaching an individual's computer is fairly easy, and it very much looks like that is what they did. It is totally another thing to breach the company itself. Assuming the company is somewhat competent, the exec might have a few sensitive but not classified documents. All classified material will be on company computers. Again, that looks from TFA like exactly what they got.

So no, Anonymous didn't breach another defense contractor. They breached an individual who helped run a defense contractor. The two are very, very different. Looks like the highest thing they got was a few documents marked "law enforcement sensitive." An embarrassment for the exec and somewhat his company, but not as bad as a breach of the company itself. Not to say the company couldn't be breached, of course, just that that isn't what seems to have happened.

Re:Executive != contractor

[Sycraft-fu]

That's because unless someone fucks up, you can't get at classified documents from your mom's basement. Classified data is supposed to be kept only on separate systems and networks. They don't intersect with the public Internet. You can't hack in to them as normal, regardless of what security flaws they might as, because you just can't get at them.

Remember that the reason Wikileaks got classified data was because it was provided to them by someone who had access. Manning not only had Top Secret clearance, but was a communications guy. He had authorized access to the systems, which he was then able to use to make an unauthorized copy he gave to Wikileaks. There was no super-hacker who somehow 0wned SIPRNet and JWICS, it was a guy who had access.

Bigger story here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally we found evidence of a Merrill Lynch wealth management advisor giving private advance notice to Garcia about upcoming S&P US credit rating downgrades.

This could be big if S&P leaked their intention to downgrade US credit rating to other investment institutions in order to financially benefit from the news. I wonder if the mainstream press will follow up on this? Sure as hell won't expect Obama's SEC, or parent DOJ, to investigate.

Re:Bigger story here?

[kevinNCSU]

Is this actually a leak or even a big deal? I thought the S&P was threatening and warning about the downgrade for like weeks beforehand? How do we know this isn't just an adviser pointing out that the blindly obvious is going to happen?