Anonops #5: Anonymous en de MO-revoluties

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http://hbgary.com/
HBGary, Inc and HBGary Federal, a separate but related company, have been the victims of an intentional criminal cyberattack. We are taking this crime seriously and are working with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities and redirecting internal resources to investigate and respond appropriately. To the extent that any client information may have been affected by this event, we will provide the affected clients with complete and accurate information as soon as it becomes available.

Meanwhile, please be aware that any information currently in the public domain is not reliable because the perpetrators of this offense, or people working closely with them, have intentionally falsified certain data. HBGary, Inc and HBGary Federal are committed to a comprehensive, accurate, and swift response to this crime.

Technical Support for all HBGary products and services is still available via email at support@hbgary.com

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Police could be forced to adopt more extreme tactics to counter the threat posed by student protesters and "hacktivists", according to Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Speaking before major protests planned across Britain at the weekend, Orde admitted that use of text messages, Twitter and Facebook to organise campaigns in record speed had created "a whole new dimension to public order".

The Metropolitan police faced questions over its handling of violent student protests last December, but Orde defended the use of kettling [see footnote] despite admitting that it could "interfere with the rights of citizens".

"I can understand the need for it," he admitted. "[It is done] for the greater good, and that's the really complex part of policing."

Orde admitted he feared protests could become more violent as public anger grew over government cuts. He claims that the use of horses to charge protesters was, when "proportionate", a "very useful, effective tactic".

On Saturday, student groups in London and Manchester will protest against the abolition of the education maintenance allowance. On Sunday UK Uncut, a group putting pressure on wealthy tax avoiders, will repeat the high street demonstrations that shut Vodafone and Topshop branches in December by targeting other big names, including Boots.

Orde hinted that UK Uncut protesters could face criminal and civil charges if they invaded shops on Sunday.

"Walking into Topshop with an intent to cause damage, [means] you're actually a burglar," he said. " If you walk into Boots and do nothing then you are simply a trespasser and the role of the police is to stand by to prevent a breach of the peace."

Anonymous, the hacker network that came to the defence of WikiLeaks last year, has also pledged more attacks in months to come.

Orde, the head of Acpo, a limited company run by police chiefs, criticised the lack of willingness of new protest groups that have sprung up around the internet to engage with police before protests. He said if they continued to refuse to co-operate, then police tactics would have to become more extreme.

"It is not good enough to throw our hands up in the air and say 'Oh, we can't negotiate because there is no one to negotiate with,'" he told Prospect magazine in an interview published today. "There are lots of people we can talk to, but they need to stand up and lead their people too. If they don't, we must be clear that the people who wish to demonstrate won't engage, communicate or share what they intend to do with us, and so our policing tactics will have to be different ... slightly more extreme."

Referring to December's student protest which exploded into violence, he said that while the vast majority of protestors were exercising their democratic rights, he believed there had been others "embedded in that crowd [who were] absolutely determined to do anything but that and cause as much disorder and mayhem as they could for their own reasons – be they anarchists or not – people who just wanted to cause trouble".

Orde, who was praised when he was in charge of policing divided communities in Northern Ireland, admitted that the police were floundering in their efforts to keep abreast of activities planned over the internet.

The National Union of Students, for example, began planning its march last November, two months before the event, while the second protest was organised in a matter of days, using text messages and Twitter. A Facebook page titled "Day X," attracted 25,000 users in days.

Orde also admitted that the standard of policing across the UK was being jeopardised by the government's refusal to modernise the way the police forces are split across 42 parts of the UK. "There is no desire from this government to review the current police force structure so we are trying to deliver 21st-century policing against a 20th-century policing structure which I would argue is a big mistake," he said.

"[We need] a broad consensus across chiefs around what tactics can be deployed, because I do see mutual aid becoming more important [as] cops are going to have to move around the country," he added. "Otherwise when you borrow cops [from different areas] you do get potentially a far more extreme situation where cops think they are doing the same thing but they are not."

Orde went on to reveal fears that protests would become more violent as the police became the focus of growing public anger at government cuts. "We're seen [as if] we are the physical manifestation of the state … and the moment the people in a crowd think that we are the state enforcing a certain specific law … then I think the propensity to violence may increase," he said.

Orde added that the risks presented by groups such as Anonymous and cyber-criminals were leading to a new brand of policing so sophisticated that it made the current generation "look like complete amateurs".

"Forty-two different police forces spread across the country are not well able to deal with [cyber crime], which is why you have to reorganise," he said.

• This article was amended on 28 January 2011. The original wrongly gave the impression that Sir Hugh Orde used the phrase "hyper-kettling", an extreme form of the containment method used to police demonstrations. He did not. Instead, he ­defended the practice of kettling in principle. This has been corrected.

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15 years ago, John Perry Barlow published this declaration, a prophetic message that resonates just as strong today.

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15 years ago today, I wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. It's still true. http://goo.gl/6cP7s

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Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral
right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social
Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognise is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

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After a tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald has learned that HBGary Federal, as well as two other data intelligence firms, worked to develop a strategic plan of attack against WikiLeaks. The plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics.

The tip from Crowdleaks.org is directly related to the highly public attack on HBGary, after Anonymous responded to research performed by HBGary Federal COO, Aaron Barr. Part of Anonymous’ response included releasing more than 50,000 internal emails to the public. For more information, the initial coverage is here.

What was pointed out by Crowdleaks is a proposal titled “The WikiLeaks Threat” and an email chain between three data intelligence firms. The proposal was quickly developed by Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, after a request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm that currently counts Bank of America as a client.

The law firm had a meeting with Bank of America on December 3. To prepare, the firm emailed Palantir and the others asking for “…five to six slides on Wikileaks - who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank.”

Hunton and Williams were recommended to Bank of America’s general council by the Department of Justice, according to the email chain viewed by The Tech Herald. The law firm was using the meeting to pitch Bank of America on retaining them for an internal investigation surrounding WikiLeaks.

“They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data,” an email between the three data intelligence firms said. “They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak.”

Hunton and Williams would act as outside council on retainer, while Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

“Apparently if they can show that WikiLeaks is hosting data in certain countries it will make prosecution easier,” the email added.

In less than 24-hours, the three analytical companies created a presentation filled with publically available information and ideas on how the firms could be “deployed” against WikiLeaks “as a unified and cohesive investigative analysis cell.”

On January 2, The New York Times wrote about a late night conference call held by Bank of America executives on November 30. The reason for the call was to deal with a statement given by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on November 29, where he said that he intended to “take down” a major American bank. The country’s third largest financial institution needed to get the jump on WikiLeaks, so they started scouring thousands of documents, and auditing physical assets.

Shortly after the late night conference call, the email from Hunton and Williams was sent. Booz Allen Hamilton, according to the Times, was the firm brought in to help manage the bank’s internal review.

A month after the proposal for the initial December meeting on WikiLeaks was created, email messages from HBGary Federal show plans for a meeting with Booz Allen Hamilton. The meeting was set after Barr emailed Hunton and Williams about information he was gathering on WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Later, this information would be the direct cause of Anonymous’ attack on HBGary.

On page two you will find an overview of the proposal developed by the three data intelligence firms.

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98 人のTwitterユーザからの情報をもとに発行されています。

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Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code.

In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project.

"They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!" he wrote. "As 1337 as these guys are suppsed to be they don't get it. I have pwned them! "

But had he?
"We are kind of pissed at him right now"
Aaron Barr

Barr's "pwning" meant finding out the names and addresses of the top Anonymous leadership. While the group claimed to be headless, Barr believed this to be a lie; indeed, he told others that Anonymous was a tiny group.

"At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls," he wrote in an internal e-mail. (All e-mails in this investigative report are provided verbatim, typos and all.) "Most of the people in the IRC channel are zombies to inflate the numbers."

The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

Near the end of January, Barr began publicizing his information, though without divulging the names of the Anonymous admins. When the Financial Times picked up the story and ran a piece on it on February 4, it wasn't long before Barr got what he wanted—contacts from the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US military. The FBI had been after Anonymous for some time, recently kicking in doors while executing 40 search warrants against group members.

Confident in his abilities, Barr told one of the programmers who helped him on the project, "You just need to program as good as I analyze."

But on February 5, one day after the Financial Times article and six days before Barr's sit-down with the FBI, Anonymous did some "pwning" of its own. "Ddos!!! Fckers," Barr sent from his iPhone as a distributed denial of service attack hit his corporate network. He then pledged to "take the gloves off."

When the liberal blog Daily Kos ran a story on Barr's work later that day, some Anonymous users commented on it. Barr sent out an e-mail to colleagues, and he was getting worked up: "They think all I know is their irc names!!!!! I know their real fing names. Karen [HBGary Federal's public relations head] I need u to help moderate me because I am getting angry. I am planning on releasing a few names of folks that were already arrested. This battle between us will help spur publicity anyway."

Indeed, publicity was the plan. Barr hoped his research would "start a verbal braul between us and keep it going because that will bring more media and more attention to a very important topic."

But within a day, Anonymous had managed to infiltrate HBGary Federal's website and take it down, replacing it with a pro-Anonymous message ("now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.") Anonymous got into HBGary Federal's e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay, all after watching his communications for 30 hours, undetected. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.

They even claimed to have wiped Barr's iPad remotely.

The situation got so bad for the security company that HBGary, the company which partially owns HBGary Federal, sent its president Penny Leavy into the Anonymous IRC chat rooms to swim with the sharks—and to beg them to leave her company alone. (Read the bizarre chat log.) Instead, Anonymous suggested that, to avoid more problems, Leavy should fire Barr and "take your investment in aaron's company and donate it to BRADLEY MANNINGS DEFENCE FUND." Barr should cough off up a personal contribution, too; say, one month's salary?

As for Barr's "pwning," Leavy couldn't backtrack from it fast enough. "We have not seen the list [of Anonymous admins] and we are kind of pissed at him right now."

Were Barr's vaunted names even correct? Anonymous insisted repeatedly that they were not. As one admin put it in the IRC chat with Leavy, "Did you also know that aaron was peddling fake/wrong/false information leading to the potential arrest of innocent people?" The group then made that information public, claiming that it was all ridiculous.

Thanks to the leaked e-mails, we now have the full story of how Barr infiltrated Anonymous, used social media to compile his lists, and even resorted to attacks on the codebase of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon used in attacks—and how others at his own company warned him about the pitfalls of his own research.

Barr had been interested in social media for quite some time, believing that the links it showed between people had enormous value when it came to mapping networks of hackers—and when hackers wanted to target their victims. He presented a talk to a closed Department of Justice conference earlier this year on "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media.

His curiosity about teasing out the webs of connections between people grew. By scraping sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, Barr believed he could draw strong conclusions, such as determining which town someone lived in even if they didn't provide that information. How? By looking at their friends.

"The next step would be ok we have 24 people that list Auburn, NY as their hometown," he wrote to the programmer implementing his directives. "There are 60 other people that list over 5 of those 24 as friends. That immediately tells me that at a minimum those 60 can be tagged as having a hometown as Auburn, NY. The more the data matures the more things we can do with it."

The same went for hackers, whose family and friends might provide information that even the most carefully guarded Anonymous member could not conceal. "Hackers may not list the data, but hackers are people too so they associate with friends and family," Barr said. "Those friends and family can provide key indicators on the hacker without them releasing it…"

His programmer had doubts, saying that the scraping and linking work he was doing was of limited value and had no commercial prospects. As he wrote in an e-mail:

Step 1 : Gather all the data

Step 2 : ???

Step 3 : Profit

But Barr was confident. "I will sell it," he wrote.

To further test his ideas and to drum up interest in them, Barr proposed a talk at the BSides security conference in San Francisco, which takes place February 14 and 15. Barr's talk was titled "Who Needs NSA when we have Social Media?" and his plan to draw publicity involved a fateful decision: he would infiltrate and expose Anonymous, which he believed was strongly linked to WikiLeaks.

"I am going to focus on outing the major players of the anonymous group I think," he wrote. "Afterall - no secrets right? We will see how far I get. I may focus on NSA a bit to just so I can give all those freespeech nutjobs something… I just called people advocating freespeech, nutjobs - I threw up in my mouth a little."

With that, the game was afoot.

more on page 2

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When Leavy showed up [in the IRC-channels] to plead her case, asking Anonymous to at least stop distributing the e-mails, the hivemind reveled in its power over Leavy and her company, resorting eventually to tough demands against Barr.

"Simple: fire Aaron, have him admit defeat in a public statement," said Topiary, when asked what the group wanted. "We won't bother you further after this, but what we've done can't be taken back. Realize that, and for the company's sake, dispose of Aaron."

Others demanded an immediate "burn notice" on Barr and donations to Bradley Manning, the young military member now in solitary confinement on suspicion of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

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And who were Barr and his company up against in all this? According to Anonymous, a five-member team took down HBGary Federal and rootkit.com, in part through the very sort of social engineering Barr had tried to employ against Anonymous.

One of those five was allegedly a 16-year old girl, who "social engineered your admin jussi and got root to rootkit.com," one Anonymous member explained in IRC. Another, pleased with power, taunted Penny Leavy and her husband, who sat beside her during the chat: "How does it feel to get hacked by a 16yr old girl?"

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trollparty It looks like some Anons are looking to get another movement going to troll the 2012 US elections - more on this later #anonymous #anonops 10 minutes ago via Trillian

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jensie91 RT @Shadowflare00: Goodbye Mubarak. Burn in hell. | #anonops #anonymous #opegypt #jan25 #egypt #cyberwar 6 minutes ago via web

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Earlier today, ThinkProgress published an exclusive report that the law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing trade association representing big business, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress. According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Attorneys for the firm solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop a sabotage campaign against progressive groups and labor unions, including ThinkProgress, the labor coalition Change to Win, SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

New emails reveal that the private spy company investigated the families and children of the Chamber’s political opponents. The apparent spearhead of this project was Aaron Barr, an executive at HB Gary. Barr circulated numerous emails and documents detailing information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives.

One of the targets was Mike Gehrke, a former staffer with Change to Win. Among the information circulated about Gehrke was the specific “Jewish church” he attended and a link to pictures of his wife and two children (sensitive information was redacted by ThinkProgress):

Another target was Brad Friedman, co-founder of The Brad Blog. Barr’s profile of Freidman included information about his life partner and his home address (sensitive information redacted by ThinkProgress):

This tactic of targeting opponents’ personal lives and family was not simply a random event. Rather, it was a concerted and deliberate effort to use anything possible to smear the Chamber’s political opponents. To dramatize his firm’s intimidation tactics, Barr sent an email to Hunton & Williams attorney John Woods that contained personal details about fellow Hunton attorney Richard Wyatt, who was representing the Chamber. The email was intended to show Woods and Wyatt how “vulnerable” they are:

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Aaron Barr, CEO of security company HBGary Federal, spent the month of January trying to uncover the real identifies of the hacker collective Anonymous—only to end with his company website knocked offline, his e-mails stolen, 1TB of backups deleted, and his personal iPad wiped when Anonymous found out.

Our lengthy investigation of that story generated such interest that we wanted to flesh out one compelling facet of the story in even more detail. In a sea of technical jargon, social media analysis, and digital detective work, it stands out as a truly human moment, when Barr revealed himself to Anonymous and dialogued directly with senior leaders and "members" of the group.

The encounter began on February 5. Barr had managed to get his work written up in a Financial Times story the day before, and now strange traffic was pouring in to HBGary Federal. With his research done and his story in print, Barr needed only to work up some conference slides and prepare for a meeting with the FBI, which had been tracking Anonymous for some time. So Barr ditched the covert identities he had been using to watch the group, and on February 5 he approached a person on Facebook whom he believed was the powerful CommanderX.

Barr's apparent motives were multiple: to mitigate any revenge upon his company, but also to meet as equals with his hacker subjects. No harm, no foul, right? Anonymous didn't agree. (Quotes in this article are provided verbatim, typos and all.)

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[23:56:51] <n0pants> Moral of the Story: Don't drum up business by banging on a hornet's nest.

[23:57:01] <CogAnon> I have a lot of people calling me.

[23:57:02] <Sabu> You intended of battling anonymous in the media for media gain and attention

[23:57:04] <Sabu> well let me ask you

[23:57:08] <Sabu> you got the media attention now

[23:57:10] <Sabu> how does it feel

[23:57:11] <Sabu> ?

[23:57:14] <CogAnon> yep

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CascadiaPirates REVOLUTION! #opiran is in full swing, "all your Ahmadinejads R belongs to us" http://anonops.ru/ #anonops join #opiran http://bit.ly/fN3WwW 4 minutes ago via TweetDeck

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http://www.thetechherald.(...)ologizes-to-reporter

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Dr. Alex Karp, the Co-Founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, one of three data intelligence firms who worked to develop a systematic plan of attack against WikiLeaks and their supporters, has severed all ties with HBGary Federal and issued an apology to reporter Glenn Greenwald.

The move comes just twenty-four hours after The Tech Herald reported on the plans, thanks to a tip from Crowdleaks.org

After the tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald learned that Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, worked together with law firm Hunton and Williams to develop a proposal for Bank of America in order to deal with the “WikiLeaks Threat.”

Hunton and Williams were recommended to Bank of America’s general counsel by the Department of Justice, according to the email chain viewed by The Tech Herald. The law firm was using the meeting to pitch Bank of America on retaining them for an internal investigation surrounding WikiLeaks.

“They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data,” an email between the three data intelligence firms said. “They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak.”

Hunton and Williams would act as outside counsel on retainer, while Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

Some of the things mentioned as potential proactive tactics against WikiLeaks include feeding the fuel between the feuding groups, disinformation, creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error.

“Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward,” the proposal said.

Moreover, reporter Glenn Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com, was singled out in the proposal as a person offering a level of support to WikiLeaks that needed to be disrupted. This disruption would include making Greenwald, and others in similar situations, choose between professional preservation and cause.

Our original coverage on this topic can be viewed here.

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The website of the Cairo secretariat of the ruling National Democratic Party has been hacked on Friday.

A message on the official website www.cairondp.org/new/ read “Closed until dropping Mubarak & the regime.” Later in the afternoon the message was changed to “Protect our country and our beloved Egypt from all enemies and harm, I love you Egypt.”

The hackers uploaded a shot from the Egyptian comedy movie “Wesh Egram” (2006) (Longstanding Criminal), in which a family of a husband, wife and their son are sitting eating watermelon. The father reacted hysterically to the TV while the son was shouting “go away” and “you made our lives hell.”

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Op vrijdag 11 februari 2011 14:14 schreef msnk het volgende:

[..]

Maar wat heeft dit met Anon te maken dan?

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Op vrijdag 11 februari 2011 14:19 schreef msnk het volgende:

[..]

Die gasten die Habbo raids houden en Tom Cruise en consorten pesten?

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CommanderX: 'Leadership' lmao [laughing my ass off] it has grown beyond my control, just as I intended.

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Op vrijdag 11 februari 2011 14:28 schreef msnk het volgende:

[..]

Zie jij ieder soort cyberattack dat gericht is op personen of groeperingen uit de politiek als een actie van 'Anon'?

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Op vrijdag 11 februari 2011 14:35 schreef msnk het volgende:

[..]

Wat is jouw definitie van Anon dan? Ik heb net verteld wat mijn beeld is bij 'Anon'.

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O most respectable and honorable citizens of Iran – the cradle of civilization,

You express yourself, and we’re listening.

We have not forgotten.

Protestants who were imprisoned, beaten, to bloggers who have been censored, citizens who were executed for criticizing the regime, you are truly loyal citizens of your country.

A new dawn appears to you and your country will be free from the chains of oppression, tyranny and torture. You can finally exhale and take a new breath of air that will fill you with strength, wisdom and freedom.

Anonymous supports you and accompany you on this path of liberation of body and mind of all Iranian citizens.

You, we are Anonymous, and do not fear the repressive regimes.

They know us, but we can not stop.

They fear us, and remain helpless to what will be unleashed against them.

Many of them are afraid of you, that’s why for so long, they enslave you.
It is now time for you to forge your own future.

The Iranian government has deliberately confused “opposition” and “disloyalty”.

Unjust repressions were perpetrated against those criticizing the actions of those in power, hoping to frighten the others. This government must be held responsible for crimes against you, its citizens.

People of Iran, you can not deny freedom of speech and the press.

Your right to freedom of assembly, demonstration and opposition.

To have access to uncensored information and unlimited access to the internet.

Your right to a life without fear or oppression.

We are Anonymous,
We are Legion
We do not forget,
We do not forgive,
Expect us.

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There's been a very strange episode being written about the past couple of days involving numerous parties, including me, that I now want to comment on.

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One section of the leaked report focused on attacking WikiLeaks' supporters and it featured a discussion of me. A graph purporting to be an "organizational chart" identified several other targets, including former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee, Guardian reporter James Ball, and Manning supporter David House. The report claimed I was "critical" to WikiLeaks' public support after its website was removed by Amazon and that "it is this level of support that needs to be disrupted"; absurdly speculated that "without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold"; and darkly suggested that "these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause." As The Tech Herald noted, "earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word 'attacked' over 'disrupted' when discussing the level of support."

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But after learning a lot more over the last couple of days, I now take this more seriously -- not in terms of my involvement but the broader implications this story highlights. For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation's largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir). Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress). And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department -- meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

That's why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal. As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue -- the full-scale merger between public and private spheres -- because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

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Bank of America has broken silence about news reports and Internet discussions circulating all week connecting BofA to these presentation slides outlining "proactive tactics" to neutralize WikiLeaks and silence its leader, Julian Assange.

"We've never seen the presentation, never evaluated it, and have no interest in it," BofA spokesman Scott Silvestri told Technology Live late Thursday.

quote:

Asked specifically about the slide deck, BofA spokesman Silvestri said: "Neither Bank of America, nor any of its vendors, have engaged HBGary Federal in this matter. We have not engaged in, nor do we have any plans to, the practices discussed in recent press reports involving HBGary Federal."

quote:

LOOK HOW THEY ARE TRYING TO INVOLVED US IN THINGS THAT WE DIDNT DO

quote:

incorrectlogin said...
If they were anonymous they are anonymous...no? If we are all anonymous then it is "us". No? Or you know who they actually are and therefore they are not anonymous?
7 February 2011 18:55

Anonymous said...
Why single out the Guardian. This story is on over a hundred newssites, including BBC, msnbc, cnet et cetera.

Also, who are "us" and for that matter who are u and htf you know that Anonymous didn't do it. U know all Anonymous?
Get a clue.
7 February 2011 19:12

Anonymous said...
who his this "we" you are talking about ?
7 February 2011 19:13

Anonymous said...
as Tonto said: "what do you mean WE white man?"
7 February 2011 19:49

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TheLibertyLamp RT @AnonymousRx: WOW, bad day for the web, I cant seem to access http://www.leader.ir/ #OpIran #Anonops #Anonymous

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No server is available to handle this request.

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The cyber world has grown out of control. State and national law enforcement mechanisms are not equipped to deal with the rapidly evolving threat. The complexity of information systems has far exceeded the ability to secure them, while reliance on these systems has only increased. HBGary has an intimate understanding of this problem; We know that understanding the attacker and his methods is the only way to defeat him. This is the core strength of HBGary and why our technology and services outperform the competition. To us, it's personal.

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Please visit HBGary at Booth #556 at the RSA Conference 2011 February 14th - 18th, 2011. HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund will be presenting at the show on Wednesday, February 16th and Friday, February 18th.

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Earlier this morning, The Tech Herald reported that Palantir Technologies severed all ties with HBGary Federal and issued an apology to reporter Glenn Greenwald. Now, Berico Technologies, the second data intelligence firm who was linked to a systematic plan of attack against WikiLeaks, has cut ties with HBGary as well.

After the tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald learned that Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, worked together with law firm Hunton and Williams to develop a proposal for Bank of America in order to deal with the “WikiLeaks Threat.”

[Original article and all updates are here.]

Hunton and Williams would act as outside counsel on retainer, while Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

Some of the things mentioned as potential proactive tactics against WikiLeaks include feeding the fuel between the feuding groups, disinformation, creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error.

Moreover, reporter Glenn Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com, was singled out in the proposal as a person offering a level of support to WikiLeaks that needed to be disrupted. This disruption would include making Greenwald, and others in similar situations, choose between professional preservation and cause.

On Thursday evening, Dr. Alex Karp, the Co-Founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, The Tech Herald a statement on the events and information presented in our original story.

“As the Co-Founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary…I have made clear in no uncertain terms that Palantir Technologies will not be involved in such activities. Moreover, we as a company, and I as an individual, always have been deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes. We plan to continue these efforts in the future,” the statement starts.

“The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.”

This afternoon, Berico Technologies’ Guy Filippelli, the CEO, and Nick Hallam, the COO, issued a similar statement.

“Our leadership does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal. We are conducting a thorough internal investigation to better understand the details of how this situation unfolded and we will take the appropriate actions within our company,” the statement reads.

“Late last year, we were asked to develop a proposal to support a law firm. Our corporate understanding was that Berico would support the firm’s efforts on behalf of American companies to help them analyze potential internal information security and public relations challenges. Consistent with industry standards for this type of work, we proposed analyzing publicly available information and identifying patterns and data flows relevant to our client’s information needs. Any subsequent discussions or proposals that attempted to extend the initial scope of work run counter to our organization’s values.”

The plot to target WikiLeaks’ organization and supporters came to light after Anonymous attacked HBGary and their affiliate HBGary Federal. The reason for the attack centers on HBGary Federal’s CEO, Aaron Barr, who went to the press claiming to have infiltrated the loosely associative group. Anonymous’ response to his claims was to hack the company and release thousands of emails to the public.

It is within these leaked emails that the plot against WikiLeaks unfolded. However, shortly after our story on WikiLeaks broke, the same three data intelligence firms were linked to a completely separate plot.

This time, the three were named in a story broken by Think Progress that said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce went to them looking for help. They wanted the three to “undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.”

The original Think Progress story is here. A follow-up, including plans to target families and children is here. Some of the relevant emails, which were all leaked by Anonymous, can be seen here.

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Hi
Am I the only one freaking over the fact that "genuine stuxnet copy" was in the e-mails? Man, this fallout is getting more and more serious.

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OnlyONE2TREE RT @C0d3Fr0sty: LOIC TARGET: http://www.elmouradia.dz/ (Algerian presidents website) DOWN!!! #Algeria #OpAlgeria #Feb12 #Anonymous 4 minutes ago via Seesmic Desktop

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Want to search the database? search.hbgary.anonleaks.ru
Protip: search for WikiLeaks, Anonymous, FBI, NASA, Stuxnet, etc.

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http://www.thetechherald.(...)a-war-with-Anonymous

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Sean-Paul, who has been following the attacks since they started, received two statements from Anonymous outlining a public awareness campaign and listing a series of reform proposals, which the collective claims it will negotiate, as long as communication is two-way.

“So from now on, WE set the scale. We come up with demands, feasible demands, about copyright, censorship and government influences. We present them the choice. And when they decide to ignore us still, we will fuck stuff up. We have been holding back on them too long. But no more of that. We switched IRC servers too often. But no more of that. They have taken down our websites too many times. But no more of that. If they want to get personal, they can GET it. So stop messing around.”

On the following pages are the full statements received from Anonymous. It remains to be seen if the reform proposals will gain the traction that is expected, but you can certainly see that some of the ideas make sense.

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The "hacktivist" group Anonymous claims to have access to the sophisticated computer virus reportedly developed as a joint Israeli-US cyber attack against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Anonymous says it has obtained details of the Stuxnet worm from the emails of HBGary, a US security company the loose hacker collective attacked earlier this month.

It is not yet clear whether Anonymous plans to deploy the computer virus, but last week the group signalled an intention to attack Iranian government websites in support of a planned green movement rally in Tehran.

However, security experts told the Guardian on Monday that even though Anonymous does have access to parts of Stuxnet, it does not control the crucial code enabling it to attack Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant – an attack Russia's Nato ambassador said could potentially trigger a "new Chernobyl".

Orla Cox, a security operations manager at Symantec, the cyber security firm that has been researching Stuxnet since its discovery, said it was "very difficult to tell" how dangerous Anonymous's copy of Stuxnet is.

"It would be possible [for Anonymous to use Stuxnet in an attack]," Cox said. "But it would require a lot of work, it's certainly not trivial.

"The impressive thing about Stuxnet is the knowledge its creators had about their target. So even if you have got access to it you need to understand the target – that requires a lot of research."

Iran admitted its controversial nuclear programme had been delayed by Stuxnet last year, with reports later claiming that the worm was a joint US-Israeli project intent on knocking Tehran's nuclear ambitions off course. No group has yet claimed responsibility for building Stuxnet. Experts told the Guardian last year that Stuxnet would have taken five to 10 people around six months to create and required large amounts of funding.

Computer viruses are largely uncharted territory for Anonymous, which has built its notoriety on crippling the websites of governments and multinational corporations, such as Visa and MasterCard, which it deems a threat to freedom of speech.

Late last month the Metropolitan police arrested and then released five people on bail, including three teenagers, it suspected of being involved in December attacks in support of WikiLeaks.

Snorre Fagerland, a senior threat researcher at the Norwegian internet security firm Norman, said it would be "very difficult" for Anonymous to use its version of Stuxnet in an attack. The hacker collective has obtained a "decompiled" version of the virus, rather than the critical source code which would enable an attack.

"The trouble with this [version of Stuxnet] is that you lose almost all context to its abilities," Fagerland said. "The original source code would contain all the text information about why it's built this way – that's gold if you want to use it. If you decompile it you lose all of that."

A new Symantec report released on Friday shows that Stuxnet was built to repeatedly infect five key industrial facilities in Iran over a 10-month period.

The worm, reportedly tested at Israel's nuclear development centre at Dimona, worked by sending Iran's centrifuges spinning out of control, while making it appear that everything was working as normal.

quote:

HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks’ Donors

]WikiLeaks and its inner circle of supporters may not have been the only targets of a group of security firms that offered to take on the secret-spilling site on behalf of Bank of America. In an email conversation, the head of one of those firms also suggested going after the thousands of individuals who have donated to the group.

Last week the loose hacker group Anonymous released a set of more than 40,000 emails from HBGary Federal, the security firm whose servers it hacked earlier this month. One of the files in those emails was a PowerPoint presentation that described “the WikiLeaks Threat,” created by a group of three security firms that suggested Nixonesque tactics for sabotaging the site on behalf of Bank of America, including spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against the site, and pressuring journalists.

Over the weekend, the loose hacker group Anonymous published another 27,000 emails from HBGary Federal’s sister company HBGary, and also created a search engine for those documents on its WikiLeaks-like site, Anonleaks.ru.

A quick search of the company’s WikiLeaks-related conversations shows that Aaron Barr, the HBGary chief executive who first caught the attention of Anonymous by boasting that he’d penetrated the group and identified its leaders, also suggested other tactics against WikiLeaks that weren’t included in that PowerPoint: namely, tracking and intimidating anyone who had given money to WikiLeaks. The security firms “need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” he wrote in an email. “Transaction records are easily identifiable.”

WikiLeaks has had its funding sources limited since December, when PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard all stopped accepting payments to the group. The site still solicits donations, however, via mail and bank transfer. Though governments could likely subpoena banks or wire transfer companies for information about those transactions, it’s not clear how HBGary Federal’s Barr planned to intercept that information.

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

HBGary Federal, Palantir, and a third security firm, Berico Technologies, were recruited by the law firm Hunton & Williams to prepare a proposal for Bank of America, which is rumored to be the subject of an upcoming megaleak of sensitive documents from WikiLeaks. The firms also did work on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to research its critics that would help to “discredit” and “shame” them.

Palantir and Berico have both said in statements that they’ve cut ties with HBGary Federal and wouldn’t participate in the strong-arm tactics represented in the leaked emails. The hacked firm itself has argued on its website that the posted documents were “falsified.” The company didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.

In a statement on the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, a representative of Anonymous responded that “Anonymous has falsified nothing; we leaked your inboxes in full with no edits. In fact, most of your emails contain S/MIME digital signatures, proving that they’re real.”

The leaked emails also reveal several comments from Barr about his attitude toward WikiLeaks and Anonymous. “O [sic] believed in what wikileaks did when they released the helicopter video. I now believe they are a menace,” he writes in one message to a HBGary colleague.

“Its all about power.” he adds in another email. “The Wikileaks and Anonymous guys think they are doing the people justice by without much investigation or education exposing information or targeting organizations? BS. Its about trying to take power from others and give it to themeselves. I follow one law. Mine.”

quote:

Palantir, in particular, has been quite aggressive about trying to distance itself. They initially issued a strong statement denouncing the plots, then had their CEO call me vowing to investigate and terminate any employees who were involved, then issued another statement over the weekend claiming that "Palantir never has and never will condone the sort of activities that HBGary recommended" and "Palantir did not participate in the development of the recommendations that Palantir and others find offensive." Such vehemence is unsurprising: the Palo-Alto-based firm relies for its recruitment efforts on maintaining a carefully cultivated image as a progressive company devoted to civil liberties, privacy and Internet freedom -- all of which would be obviously sullied by involvement in such a scheme.

But as Salon's Justin Elliott reports, there are newly emerged facts which directly contradict Palantir's denials. On Sunday night, Anonymous released an additional 25,000 emails from HBGary, and Forbes' Andy Greenberg was the first to make this discovery:

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

Greenberg is referring to this series of emails, first from HBGary's Barr -- addressed to Palantir's Matthew Steckman and Eli Bingham along with Berico's Sam Kremin (click image to enlarge):

This was the reply from Palantir's Steckman to that email:

Roughly 15 minutes later, Steckman sent another email to Barr: "Updated with Strengths/Weaknesses and a spotlight on Glenn Greenwald...thanks Aaron!" -- indicating he had included the slide featuring this scheme. So much for Palantir's insistence that they "did not participate in the development of the recommendations." As Elliott noted, "Steckman's role in creating the slideshow -- which, it should be noted, also carries Palantir's logo -- would seem to contradict the company's" denials.

Last night, both Elliott and I sent emails to Palantir's General Counsel asking the company to reconcile this obvious contradiction. In response, they issued a statement announcing that they "have decided to place Matthew Steckman, 26 year old engineer, on leave pending a thorough review of his actions." They added that Palantir "was not retained by any party to develop such recommendations and indeed it would be contrary to Palantir’s ethics, culture and policies to do so" (Elliott has posted Palantir's full statement).

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NEW YORK - Bewegingen voor democratie en vrijheid in Iran en andere landen in het Midden-Oosten kunnen rekenen op morele en technologische ondersteuning van de Verenigde Staten.

Die boodschap hebben president Barack Obama en minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Hillary Clinton ondubbelzinnig laten klinken in Washington.

Harde hand
Obama keerde zich dinsdag tegen het Iraanse regime en andere heersers die demonstraties met harde hand neerslaan. Zonder instemming en deelname van het volk is regeren niet langer mogelijk, waarschuwde de Amerikaanse president tijdens een persconferentie. 'Zeker in deze nieuwe tijd, nu mensen direct kunnen communiceren. Ze kunnen een telefoon of twitteraccount gebruiken om honderdduizenden mensen te mobiliseren.'

Opstandelingen in Tunesië, Egypte en andere landen in de regio hebben Twitter, Facebook en YouTube gebruikt om te communiceren met elkaar en de buitenwereld, en om protesten te organiseren. De bedreigde autocratische regimes reageerden door het gebruik van internet in te perken, zoals in Egypte gebeurde.

Sociale media toegankelijk
De Amerikanen zullen er alles aan doen om de sociale media toegankelijk te houden voor dissidenten en activisten, zei minister Clinton dinsdag tijdens een toespraak over internetvrijheid. Een 'alomvattende innovatieve aanpak' zal 'diplomatie koppelen aan technologie, veilige distributienetwerken, en directe steun voor hen aan de frontlijnen'. De freedom to connect (de vrijheid om verbindingen te maken) geldt evengoed op straat als op het internet, betoogde zij. 'De VS steunen deze vrijheid voor mensen overal.'

Buitenlandse Zaken twittert sinds kort in het Arabisch en Perzisch. 'Wij willen aan jullie conversaties deelnemen', zo luidde een recente tweet. In een ander bericht riepen de VS Iran op om mensen dezelfde universele rechten als in Caïro te geven.

Maandag prees Clinton de moed van het Iraanse volk, nadat in dat land protesten waren uitgebroken. Tegelijkertijd hekelde zij de hypocrisie van de machthebbers in Teheran. Die spraken steun uit voor de opstand in Egypte. Volgens Clinton illustreren zij hun ware aard door demonstraties in eigen land neer te slaan.

Ommekeer
De eenduidige boodschap van Clinton en Obama markeert een ommekeer. Tijdens de opstand in Egypte liet de Amerikaanse regering verschillende geluiden horen. De impuls van Obama's jonge garde van adviseurs was om de vrijheidsstrijd te ondersteunen. Het ministerie van Clinton - de 'oude' gevestigde orde op internationaal gebied - leek meerdere malen op de rem te staan door 'stabiliteit' en een lager tempo van verandering te bepleiten.

Uit reconstructies in de Amerikaanse media bleek de afgelopen dagen dat er inderdaad een intern conflict broeide, wat leidde tot kritiek en verwarring onder activisten. 'Het gebrek aan een heldere boodschap illustreerde opnieuw hoe diep verdeeld Obama's buitenlandploeg nog steeds is', aldus The New York Times.

Twijfel
Vrijdag trachtte president Obama de twijfel weg te nemen. Hij prees het vertrek van Mubarak en het succes van de pro-democratiebeweging. Sindsdien zijn hoge afgezanten naar bevriende landen in het Midden-Oosten gezonden om een vinger aan de pols te houden.

De vraag is niet of het internet 'een kracht voor bevrijding of voor onderdrukking' is, zei Clinton over internetvrijheid. 'Het gaat om de principes waar we ons door laten leiden.'

quote:

There are other tensions in the State Department’s agenda: It champions the free flow of information, except when it is in secret departmental cables made public by WikiLeaks; it wants to help Chinese citizens circumvent their government’s Internet firewall, but is leery of one of the most popular services for doing so, which is sponsored by Falun Gong, a religious group outlawed by Beijing as an evil cult.

Mrs. Clinton tried to reconcile one of those tensions. She described the WikiLeaks disclosures as “an act of theft” of sensitive government documents whose publication made it far harder, she said, for the United States to protect its security or promote human rights and democracy around the world. “WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom,” she said.

quote:

And Facebook does not want to alter its firm policy requiring users to sign up with their real identities. The company says this requirement protects its users from fraud. However, human rights advocates like Susannah Vila, the director of content and outreach for Movements.org, which provides resources for digital activists, say it could put some people at risk from governments looking to ferret out dissent.

“People are going to be using this platform for political mobilization, which only underscores the importance of ensuring their safety,” she said.

Under those rules, Facebook shut down one of the most popular Egyptian Facebook protest pages in November because Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who emerged as a symbol of the revolt, had used a pseudonym to create a profile as one of the administrators of the page, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

With Egypt’s emergency law in place limiting freedom of speech, Mr. Ghonim might have put himself and the other organizers at risk if they were discovered at that time. Activists scrambled to find another administrator to get the page back up and running. And when Egyptian government authorities did figure out Mr. Ghonim’s role with the Facebook page that helped promote the Jan. 25 protest in Tahrir Square, he was imprisoned for 12 days.

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Over the last week, I've talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary's defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet.

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The tendency to relate past events to what is possible in the present becomes more difficult as the scope of the geopolitical environment changes. It is a useful thing, then, to ask every once in a while if the environment has recently undergone any particular severe changes, thereby expanding our options for the future.

Terminology, let alone our means of exchanging information, has changed to such a degree that many essential discussions in today's "communications age" would be entirely incomprehensible to many two decades ago.

As the social, political and technological environment has developed, some have already begun to explore new options, seizing new chances for digital activism - and more will soon join in. It is time for the rest of the world to understand why.

Service denied

When a release by WikiLeaks revealed the depravity of just how corrupt and horrid the Tunisian government really was, it prompted Tunisians to step up active dissent and take to the streets en masse for the first time.

In response, a loose network of participants within the international Anonymous protest organisation attacked non-essential government websites - those not providing direct services to Tunisians - at the prompting of our contacts.

Several such sites were replaced with a message of support to the Tunisian people, while others were pushed offline via distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, involving thousands of computer users who request large amounts of data from a website simultaneously, overwhelming it.

Other assistance programmes followed, even after the deposed Ben Ali fled the nation that reviled him, with Anonymous and other parties working with Tunisians - both in-country and abroad - to provide the nation's people with the tools and information resources they needed to begin building up new, reasonable political institutions capable of ensuring a freer civic life.

Our "Guide to Protecting the Tunisian Revolution" series - a collaboration between hundreds of veterans of traditional revolutionary movements as well as practitioners of "new activism" - were disseminated both online and in print; aside from tips on safety during confrontation and the like, these also explain how to establish secure yet accessible networks and communications for Tunisians, as well as instructions on establishing neighbourhood syndicates capable of uniting in common cause.

Already, such organisations are being established across Tunisia, just as they will be established elsewhere as the movement proceeds.

The seeds of cyber revolution

Anonymous is a means by which people across the globe can assist in the hard work being performed by the Tunisian people - who have long taken issue with their government, but first began protesting in earnest after a fruit vendor set himself ablaze in response to police cruelty.

The Anonymous movement itself grew out of message boards frequented mostly by young people with an interest in internet culture in general - and Japanese media in particular; in 2005, participants began "attacking" internet venues as a sort of sport, and in the process honed their skills in a way that proved useful in "information warfare".

In 2007, some users proposed that the Church of Scientology be exposed for its unethical and sometimes violent conduct, sparking a coordinated global protest movement that differed from anything else seen, and which still continues today.

The Australian government was later attacked for introducing new internet censorship laws, and in the meantime, those within Anonymous who see the subculture as a potential force for justice have launched other efforts while also building new strategies and recruiting individuals from across the globe - some of whom hold significant positions in media, industry, and the sciences.

For great justice

In the meantime, there are obstacles to overcome. Those within the Tunisian government who seek to deny liberty to "their" people are easy enough to deal with; the greatest threat to revolution comes not from any state but rather from those who decry such revolutions without understanding them.

In this case, the idea that a loose network of people with shared values and varying skill sets can provide substantial help to a population abroad is seen as quixotic - or even unseemly - by many of those who have failed to understand the past ten years, as well as those whose first instinct is to attack a popular revolt rather than to assist it.

Elsewhere, a number of US pundits decided to criticise the revolution as possibly destabilising the region; many of whom once demanded the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan - and greeted every Arab revolt as the work of President Bush - but now see nothing for themselves in the cause of Arab liberty.

Some have even portrayed the movement as the work of radical Islamists - yet most cannot find Tunisia on a map.

Suffice to say that the results of our efforts are already on display and will become more evident as Tunisians use our tools and resources to achieve their greatest triumph. Those who wish to assist and are competent to do so can find us easily enough; the Tunisians had little trouble in doing so.

Although we have made great progress in convincing individuals from across the world to join our efforts in Tunisia, other campaigns, such as those taking place in Algeria and Egypt - both of which have seen government websites taken down and/or replaced by Anonymous, more must be done before the movement takes the next step towards a worldwide network capable of perpetual engagement against those who are comfortable with tyranny.

The revolution will be broadcast

Whatever effort is required, such a goal is not only possible, but rather unambitious.

There is a reason, after all, that those of us who have seen the movement up close have dedicated our lives to what it stands for, and have even violated the modern Western taboo of believing in something.

I have been involved with Anonymous in some capacity or another for about six years.

Looking back at my writing over that time, I have found that my predictions, while always enthusiastic, nonetheless turned out to have been conservative; when Australia became the first state to come under attack by this remarkable force, I proposed that we would someday see such allegedly inevitable institutions begin to crumble in the face of their growing irrelevance.

Someday turned out to be this year.

Today, I predict that Anonymous and entities like it will become far more significant over the next few years than is expected by most of our similarly irrelevant pundits - and this will, no doubt, turn out to be just as much of an understatement as anything else that has been written on the subject.

The fact is that the technological infrastructure that allows these movements has been in place for well under a decade - but phenomena such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous have already appeared, expanded, and even become players within the geopolitical environment; others have come about since.

This is the future, whether one approves or not, and the failure on the part of governments and media alike to understand, and contend with the rapid change now afoot, ought to remind everyone concerned why it is that this movement is necessary in the first place.

The author identifies as part of Anonymous, a loose collective of internet hacktivists which uses the technological infrastructure on which the globalised world depends to maintain a vigilante presence online.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

quote:

Just as HBGary was plotting to attack WikiLeaks, it was on the way to getting Defense Department security clearance

It's well known at this point that HBGary Federal was one of several technology firms recently exposed for scheming to attack WikiLeaks, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, and critics of the Chamber of Commerce. What has gotten less attention is just how much business HBGary Federal and its partner company, HBGary, do with the United States government.

Internal HBGary Federal emails reviewed by Salon show that the firm was on its way to getting security clearance at the Department of Defense late last month. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr has bragged that the firm provides "specialized threat intelligence, incident response, and information operations capabilities to the IC [Intelligence Community], DoD, and Federal agencies." The exact nature of the services provided by HBGary Federal -- and what intelligence agencies might be involved -- is not clear.

(The plotting against WikiLeaks and Chamber of Commerce critics, by the way, was performed by HBGary Federal at the behest of Hunton and Williams, a law firm that has worked for the Chamber and Bank of America, which is reportedly a future target of WikiLeaks. This work was apparently separate from the HBGary Federal's government work.)

HBGary proper, which is based in California, is known as a provider of malware detection services. HBGary Federal, which shares offices with HBGary and 15 percent of which is owned by HBGary executives, was touted as offering "best-in-class malware analysis and incident response products and expert classified services to the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and other U.S. government agencies," according to one November 2009 email. Another internal email describes HBGary Federal as a wholly owned subsidiary of HBGary.

HBGary itself has won $3.3 million in federal government work since 2004, contracting records show. That includes contracts for services like "protection vulnerability assessment" with the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the FBI, and the Department of Interior.

Having proper clearance is key to winning federal security contracts. So it's not surprising that the bio of HBGary Federal's chief operating officer, Ted Vera, notes that he holds "security clearances with the DoD and Intelligence Community." Barr, for his part, came to HBGary Federal after stints as a Navy cryptologist and a cybersecurity official at Northrop Grummans, the defense contracting giant. A former CEO of HBGary Federal, Jamie Butler, who left the firm in 2006, held a security clearance at the "top secret" level.

On Jan. 27 -- when the plotting against WikiLeaks had already been underway for a few months -- HBGary Federal was granted what's known as "facility clearance" at the Defense Department. That's a precursor to getting specific classified access once a contract has been granted. (See the approval document, approved by the Defense Security Service, here.) DSS spokeswoman Cindy McGovern told Salon today that HBGary Federal is still in the process of getting its clearance. She had no comment on the fact that HBGary is implicated in the WikiLeaks scandal.

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February 16, 2011, 09:39 AM —

Benjamin Spock de Vries would like the world to know he is not a cyber terrorist.

But if you read some of the 40,000+ emails that were stolen from HBGary Federal by Anonymous and posted on Pirate Bay, you might think otherwise.

It seems Aaron Barr -- the CEO of HBGary Federal who thought he’d make a big splash by outing the leadership of Anonymous and instead ended up getting ridden hard and put away wet by the very hackers he sought to expose -- decided de Vries is in fact the mysterious Commander X, alleged puppetmaster of the Anonymous collective. So he said as much in some of the thousands of private email conversations the Anons just shared with the world.

[ See also: That new Facebook friend might just be a spy ]

This did not make de Vries happy.

“I am not Anonymous,” de Vries told me during an agitated phone conversation last night. “I have never logged onto any Anonymous sites. I don’t use IRC. I couldn’t hack my way out of a paper bag.”

In fact, de Vries says he hadn’t even heard of the whole HBGary-Anonymous mishegas until Barr contacted him on February 5 via his Facebook alter ego, Julian Goodspeak (yes, really), and begged de Vries to please call off the DDOS attack on HBGary’s servers.

What attack? de Vries asked.

What followed was a weirdly elliptical conversation in which Barr chatted with the person he thought was Commander X while de Vries thought they were talking about something else entirely.

The reason Barr thought De Vries was the elusive X? Because de Vries is the founder and admin of a Facebook Group called Global Strike 2011, which appears to be popular with the Anons. That, or many of its members are just particularly enamored of Guy Fawkes masks and wicked cool handles like Anarcho Femmina and Anonomous AnonopsEsp (then again, who isn’t?).

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Thank you commander X. If
Thank you commander X. If anything, anon is responsible only for bringing this to my attention and making the evidence I need available to me. Mr. Barr has said "I wasn't going to tell anybody". Only PROVES that he is a habitual liar as well as all the other expletives that have been pointed in his direction this week. http://hbgary.anonleaks.ru/greg_hbgary_com/25982.html And yes, I fully intend to take the most aggressive legal action possible. I suppose my next step is to concoct some story about Aaron's paedophilia and operation of a child prostitution ring in DC and report that to the FBI. If he can do it and get away with it, so can I. I jest.
by Ben de Vries (not verified) on 2/16/11 at 6:17 pm | reply | Email this page | Printer-friendly version

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AMSTERDAM - De VS zijn medeverantwoordelijk voor het gemak waarmee landen als Egypte het internetverkeer kunnen afknijpen. Daarom heeft president Obama boter op zijn hoofd als hij de wereld een vrij internet belooft, vindt hoogleraar Computerveiligheid Bart Jacobs van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Als hij zijn eigen burgers niet wilde afluisteren en controleren, zou dat voor dictatoriale regimes ook een stuk moeilijker zijn.'Het goede nieuws is: ja, de Verenigde Staten kunnen het internet in het Midden-Oosten vrijer maken', zegt Jacobs. 'Maar dan moeten de Verenigde Staten wel bij zichzelf beginnen.' Dat is het slechte nieuws: Amerika is medeverantwoordelijk voor het gemak waarmee repressieve regimes hun burgers kunnen afluisteren en controleren via internet.

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It’s all very amusing, with this one tiny caveat. It’s apparent that Federal authorities in the US are entirely clueless about some basics about the operation of the internet and internet-based groups. The grand jury request for information in the current investigations of Anonymous is downright bizarre, including a reference to the “internet activist group 4chan” (yes, snarky, offensive image board as “activist group”), information on the “identification and locations of person(s) using or controlling or disseminating denial of service software” (um, your first port of call is Google, folks, because that’s the easiest way to find a version of LOIC), and the most remarkable demand of all, “any and all records, documents, and materials that relate to interactions between any computers of those who were raided and those who are untouchable.”

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Perhaps everybody around the globe who uses the Internet ought to email the FBI
with the subject “I am Anonymous”.

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Also, a major protest is planned for April 7th, on the steps of The City Hall with speakers from Anonymous, executive director of National Lawyers Guild, Gregg Housh, Barry Eisler, Glenn Greenwald, Barret Brown and other... special guests. Don't miss it!

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Three attorneys at Hunton & Williams, the international law firm that is implicated in a scheme to attack WikiLeaks and critics of the Chamber of Commerce, will be hit with bar complaints next week by anti-Chamber activists who were targeted in the scheme.

"It's a powerhouse law firm and if they're allowed to deal in this kind of illegal activity, what do ethics in the law mean?" asks Kevin Zeese, attorney for the group StopTheChamber.com. "These guys are openly talking about potentially criminal activities -- invading privacy, moving toward libel and slander and defamation of character -- by creating forged documents, tricking us to putting them out, and accusing us of putting out disinformation."

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Lessons In Transparency
The attacks on HBGary Inc. have become a little more mundane — lately, somebody keeps trying to make the company's fax machine run out of paper.

Butterworth says he doesn't know anything about the proposals revealed in the e-mails, but he doesn't think Anonymous has any right to brag about the information exposed.

"Before they decided to do what they did and break the law, they had no knowledge of what was in those e-mails, they had no knowledge of who we were," he says.

Butterworth makes it clear he's not about to take lessons in transparency from a group that calls itself Anonymous.

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I have a feeling I’ll be doing a lot of these posts, showing how Hunton & Williams asked “Themis” (the three firm team of HBGary, Palantir, and Berico Technologies) to apply counterterrorism approaches to combat First Amendment activities.

This particular installment comes from an early presentation and accompanying proposal Themis prepared for Hunton & Williams. These documents were attached to an email dated November 2, 2010 sent out by Berico Technologies’ Deputy Director. He explains that the presentation and proposal would be briefed to H&W the following day.

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The proposal also highlights the JSOC experience of one Palantir team member.

He commanded multiple Joint Special Operations Command outstations in support of the global war on terror. Doug ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election. As a commander, Doug ran the entire intelligence cycle: identified high-level terrorists, planned missions to kill or capture them, led the missions personally, then exploited the intelligence and evidence gathered on target to defeat broader enemy networks.

Berico’s statement (from their CEO, Guy Filippelli, whose experience as Special Assistant to the Director of National Intelligence was also highlighted in the proposal) denied they would proactively target any Americans and spun the project itself as “consistent with industry standards for this type of work.”

Berico Technologies is a technical and analytic services firm that helps organizations better understand information critical to their core operating objectives. Our leadership does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals.

[snip]

Late last year, we were asked to develop a proposal to support a law firm. Our corporate understanding was that Berico would support the firm’s efforts on behalf of American companies to help them analyze potential internal information security and public relations challenges. Consistent with industry standards for this type of work, we proposed analyzing publicly available information and identifying patterns and data flows relevant to our client’s information needs.

Yet it was Berico Technologies’ Deputy Director who sent out these documents adopting a military targeting approach for responding to citizens engaging in free speech.

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My guess is that the reason that Palantir’s CEO practically fell out of his chair in his rush to apologize to Glenn was to prevent exactly this. He didn’t want Glenn or anyone else to take a closer look. These guys really are idiots.

If this really is the best intelligence money can buy and if these guys really are former veteran intel guys, it’s hardly any wonder that the Washington chorus of Who Could Have Ever Imagined has become as endless as 100 Bottles of Beer on The Wall…

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Even as the FBI was conducting its ongoing campaign of surveillance and armed raids against those of us involved in the Anonymous activist collective, that and other "law enforcement" agencies were simultaneously providing resources and work opportunities to a collection of federal contractors, which were themselves engaged in a variety of reckless and unethical activities to which they are now being held to account by the press, if not the government. Anyone who had written up such a situation as fiction would rightfully be thrown out of a publisher's office for having produced a work of fiction with such a ludicrous plot.
Aaron Barr, CEO of security firm HBGary Federal The advice of Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal, to fellow cybersecurity professionals: 'Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.'

On the Saturday before last, an article appeared in Financial Times in which a certain Aaron Barr, head of US federal contractor HBGary Federal, claimed to have identified by name what he termed Anonymous's "leadership". We responded with a press release conceding defeat. The next day, our hackers infiltrated Barr's personal data as well as that of HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary, thereafter releasing tens of thousands of company emails, as well as the very document that Barr had planned to sell to the FBI – a document that turned out to be both hilariously inaccurate and not-so-hilariously destined to get some undetermined number of innocents raided by government agents, despite them not having any connection to Anonymous whatsoever. We then released all of these materials ourselves, and in doing so revealed documents that included plans to collect information on the family members of political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as a proposal to attack WikiLeaks and key supporter Glenn Greenwald by means of a range of unethical and possibly illegal tactics now being reported by media outlets world wide.

This farrago of embarrassments doesn't end there: shortly after the attack, I spoke to Barr via phone (the conversation is on record), during which the clearance-possessing federal contractor made misleading statements to me about his intentions in collecting information about activists who were meanwhile involved in providing assistance to pro-democracy campaigners in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Later, as we and reporters went through the acquired emails and other data, we began to discover the full extent of the plans for surveillance and dirty tricks. We were left with an abiding sense of the sickness that plagues institutions that already spend millions on public relations lest they be considered on their merits.

As the story unfolds, Anonymous will continue to conduct the investigation that, in a more perfect world, would be immediately pursued by law enforcement agencies. Anonymous will likewise continue to work with the press and independent observers to reveal the truth of what US taxpayer dollars and corporate "emergency response" funds actually go to produce. Meanwhile, our opponents and antagonists will continue to lie to you. All we ask is that you compare our words and actions with theirs, and decide which of these two factions your conscience would prompt you to support.

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Op vrijdag 18 februari 2011 14:35 schreef Dhalsim het volgende:

[..]

Ge-wel-dig...ik denk dat de zogenaamde "security experts" voortaan wel 2x nadenken voordat ze enige vorm van victorie over anonymous gaan claimen. Het zal keer op keer leiden tot een dikke faal. Heeft naast kennis en kunde ook vooral te maken met motivatie.

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February 18, 2011, 01:10 PM —

On our last episode of Thank You For Not Sharing, I spoke with Ben de Vries, wrongfully accused by HBGary security wonk Aaron Barr of being the mysterious and elusive Commander X, alleged puppet-master behind the Anonymous collective.

(And if you’re not up to speed on the ongoing saga of HBGary and Anonymous, read this, this, and this. I’ll wait.)

It turns out Commander X is not that elusive, though he’s still somewhat mysterious. Because – unlike Aaron Barr -- I just enjoyed a long and fascinating chat with him.

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I'd like to switch to a few questions about HBGary, if that's alright. Have you ever had any contact with Aaron Barr or anyone else from HBGary?

Aaron Barr knows better than to contact me. Trust me, he is losing sleep waiting for what comes next. His life is basically destroyed now. And he deserves it. As for what else I could do to Mr. Barr, that is for me to delight in and him to lose sleep over.

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Interesting take...
Thanks to both of you for the interesting interview. It got me thinking...

Stuxnet: I'll take the opinions of experience people that looked at the source that Stuxnet was a team (or two teams) effort with no firm guiding hand. We don't even know whether the source released was the initial deploy or an update. But we can make a pretty good guess that it was a government project, considering the target. Governments like to build weapons... and that's my point.

Maybe most of the malicious maulware out there came from government programs. Criminals use the ones that ecscape into the wild for their own nefarious purposes. The criminal mind is all about fast money and little work. They don't have the patience or motivation to write good code.

The whole HBGary Saga only proves out what I've thought for years. That governments just couldn't allow the internet to exist without having as much control over it as they can.

Almost all serious internet disruptions have been caused by governments. Burma, Nepal, Egypt and targeted filtering in many other countries are a direct result of government control. Anonymous' DDoS campaigns pale in comparison. If we have to stop anything here, we need strong laws curtailing governments from interfering with the free flow of information. But since they MAKE the laws...

It's not that 'hackers' don't create or use malicious code. Sometimes their are very good reasons to use such tactics; like taking down a pedophile network because the authorities wouldn't except my evidence, is one example I have personal experience with. In the end I was right and Re: HBGary, a case where 'stolen' information led to conviction.

So I have no qualms whatsoever at the tactics used by Anonymous against HBGary and my (white) hat goes off to you, with respect.

I know who the 'enemy' is and I trust CommanderX knows too. I hope enough other people get the message. Critical mass is important in this debate

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Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of "persona management software."

While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple "official" social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.

Unfortunately, the Air Force's contract description doesn't help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent."

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https://www.fbo.gov/index(...)b2&tab=core&_cview=1
Solicitation Number:RTB220610
Notice Type:Sources Sought
Synopsis:
Added: Jun 22, 2010 1:42 pm Modified: Jun 22, 2010 2:07 pmTrack Changes
0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

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AN OPEN LETTER FROM ANONYMOUS

February 16, 2011

TO THE CONGREGANTS OF WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH:

We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS - the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People - have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism. We have always regarded you and your ilk as an assembly of graceless sociopaths and maniacal chauvinists & religious zealots, however benign, who act out for the sake of attention & in the name of religion.

Being such aggressive proponents for the Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information as we are, we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching your benighted gospel of hatred and your theatrical exhibitions of, not only your fascist views, but your utter lack of Christ-like attributes. You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance. Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.

Your demonstrations and your unrelenting cascade of disparaging slurs, unfounded judgments, and prejudicial innuendos, which apparently apply to every individual numbered amongst the race of Man - except for yourselves - has frequently crossed the line which separates Freedom of Speech from deliberately utilizing the same tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse that have been previously exploited and employed by tyrants and dictators, fascists and terrorist organizations throughout history.

ANONYMOUS cannot abide this behavior any longer. The time for us to be idle spectators in your inhumane treatment of fellow Man has reached its apex, and we shall now be moved to action. Thus, we give you a warning: Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites.

Should you ignore this warning, you will meet with the vicious retaliatory arm of ANONYMOUS: We will target your public Websites, and the propaganda & detestable doctrine that you promote will be eradicated; the damage incurred will be irreversible, and neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover. It is in your best interest to comply now, while the option to do so is still being offered, because we will not relent until you cease the conduction & promotion of all your bigoted operations & doctrines.

The warning has been given. What happens from here shall be determined by you.

WE ARE ANONYMOUS.
WE ARE LEGION.
WE DO NOT FORGIVE.
WE DO NOT FORGET.
EXPECT US.

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#operaciovalencia OPERATION

@operacio_tv3



Valencian government has taken down a legal Television channel (TV3).

This is unnacceptable.

FINISHED ---- 18 february 2011; 18:30h (GMT+1)

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February 17, 2011
HBGary, Inc. is nearing the completion of our immediate incident response process as well as providing requested information to our Customers and partners following the recent criminal attacks. I want to assure the community that HBGary, Inc. remains strong, both financially and operationally. This event has made HBGary, Inc. even more committed to our work and in fact has further clarified our corporate vision. This crime shows even companies with fully patched systems are but a single credential away from compromise.

With regard to the incident itself, let me assure you that we have performed a full forensic investigation of the incident and are making appropriate upgrades to our operational security. The product development network has been, and always will be, air-gapped from all other networks. We have also determined, as expected, that no commercial source code was accessed or stolen.

With regard to some of the information that came to light as a result of the publishing of stolen information, I want to assure you that your HBGary team did not participate in the development of the proposals that have been the focus of media attention. As most of you know, HBGary, Inc. and HBGary Federal are separate companies and have different management. The media confusion around this point has been unfortunate and we have been working diligently to correct it.

I would like to thank everyone who reached out to us with encouraging words during this ordeal. The outpouring of support has shown that the security community is willing to take care of its’ own. HBGary, Inc. is going to return the favor by redoubling our efforts in advanced malware detection technology. I would especially like to thank the employees of HBGary, Inc. for their strength and personal dedication. Everyone at HBGary, Inc. is ready to get back to business as usual.

Sincerely,

Greg Hoglund
Chief Executive Officer
HBGary, Inc.

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http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/15tKmN/www.webpronews.com/topnews/2011/02/18/ps3-hackers-respond-to-sonys-threats
Earlier, Sony threatened those who hack their PlayStation 3s with permanent banishment from their Playstation Network. Naturally, some of these would-be hackers didn't take too kindly to Sony's threats, and have responded with perhaps another hack that threatens to make a mockery of Sony's method of punishment.

According to a post at Destructoid.com, some PS3 hackers have found a way to exploit an security hole that allows them to unban the banned accounts. Not only that, but this exploit will allow these same hackers to actually other PlayStations, provided the pertinent information is available.

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On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous.

"I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps," wrote Hoglund. "I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to [analyze] it and see what it's about. DONT open it unless in a [virtual machine] obviously… DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)"

The attached document, which is in English, begins: "LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION)."

It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one's enemies with knives (try "the area directly above the genitals"), with ropes ("Choking… there is no other area besides the neck"), with blunt objects ("Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick."), and with hands ("Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.").
The purported Al-Qaeda document

But the poison recipes, for ricin and other assorted horrific bioweapons, are the main draw. One, purposefully made from a specific combination of spoiled food, requires "about two spoonfuls of fresh excrement." The document praises the effectiveness of the resulting poison: "During the time of the destroyer, Jamal Abdul Nasser, someone who was being severely tortured in prison (he had no connection with Islam), ate some feces after losing sanity from the severity of the torture. A few hours after he ate the feces, he was found dead."

According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers. Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker's darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons.

Thanks to a cache of HBGary e-mails leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous, we have at least a small glimpse through a dirty window into the process by which tax dollars enter the military-industrial complex and emerge as malware.

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Onlangs werd bekend dat het Amerikaanse beveiligingsbedrijf HBGary Federal in opdracht van Bank of America serieuze plannen had om WikiLeaks ‘onschadelijk te maken’. Dat weten we dankzij een groepje supernerds dat vooralsnog anoniem wenst te blijven, maar die we inmiddels beter kennen als Anonymous.

Maar dat was niet het einde van de cyberthriller (of is het een soap?) waarin HBGary Federal, WikiLeaks en Anonymous een hoofdrol spelen. Nog steeds laat Anonymous een gestage stroom privémails uit de archieven van HBGary lekken. We geven hier een (heel summiere) samenvatting van wat er zoal aan smerigheid uit die mails naar voren is gekomen (Infoworld.com heeft ook een fijne samenvatting):

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SueVerinity says:
Gisteren, 15:38:59
“Ik denk dat Aaron Barr beter had moeten weten; tenslotte als je jezelf de titel security-expert toekent zou je je de risico's moeten beseffen die aan het infiltreren van een groep "hackers" kleven. Overigens de namen in Barr's PDF (waaronder ook ondergetekende..) geven geen goed beeld van de werkelijkheid. Ongeveer 30 van mijn Facebook-vrienden en ikzelf die sympathie voelen voor Wikileaks en Anonymous, worden door Barr geportreteerd alszijnde "leiders van Anonymous", hetgeen klinklare onzin is. Ik kan zelf niet eens een DVD-recorder programmeren, laat staan dat ik kan hacken. Ook deze assumptie van Barr is dus onjuist. Dit geldt voor de meeste van de 30 genoemde personen in Barr's "research". Het enige waar wij "schuldig" aan zijn is het speuren naar en verspreiden van informatie omtrent Wikileaks en Anonymous. Ik nodig de FBI en welke andere overheidsinstantie dan ook van harte uit te pogen mij te vervolgen op grond van het hebben van een uitgesproken mening. Het enige wat Barr heeft getracht is om Facebook-accounts te koppelen aan Nicknames in de zgh. IRC-chatrooms over Anonymous en ook hierin is hij niet goed geslaagd. Diegene(n) die de hack uiteindelijk hebben gepleegd ken ik niet persoonlijk en zijn ons spontaan te hulp geschoten nadat Barr's malafide en kwalijke intenties aan het licht kwamen. Hiervoor ben ik hen zeer dankbaar en ik hoop dat het een goed voorbeeld is geweest van de mogelijke consequenties voor anderen die Anonymous ten onrechte in een kwaad daglicht willen stellen. De geloofwaardigheid van zowel HBGary/HBGary Federal en Aaron Barr zijn gedaald tot nul. Verder komen er nu tal van sinistere feiten over hen boven tafel waaruit blijkt dat zij zich schuldig maken aan diverse duistere projecten (Magenta) en complotten (samen met Palantir en Bank of America). Als iemand iets te verbergen heeft/had zijn het wel Barr en bovengenoemde bedrijven en niet Anonymous. In conclusie: Barr is meer dan in gelijke munt terugbetaald en heeft tienvoudig gefaald in zijn onderzoek.

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http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/buffett-closes-out-his-bank-of-america-stake/?scp=2&sq=hbgary&st=cse

Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company run by Warren E. Buffett, sold off its remaining five million shares of Bank of America in the fourth quarter.

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Robert Charleston
San Francisco, CA
February 15th, 2011
6:47 am

I wonder if the is just in time.....is he anticipating the Wikileaks information about BofA coming out soon? With all the drama this past weekend involving HBGary, BofA and Anonymous, it is only a matter of time until BofA faces some serious public backlash. How does Buffet always stay one step ahead?

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http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/4936/VK-Dossier-Onrust-in-het-Midden-Oosten/article/detail/1836488/2011/02/19/Libie-regime-legt-internet-plat.dhtml

TRIPOLI - Het internet in Libië is zaterdag kort na middernacht (Nederlandse tijd) platgelegd om de antiregeringsbetogers tegen te werken. Libië was 'abrupt offline' om kwart over een zaterdagochtend vroeg. Dat heeft Arbor Networks, een in de VS gevestigde volger van internetactiviteiten, zaterdag gemeld.

Het regime van de 68-jarige Muammar Kaddafi bezwoer vrijdag alle protesten de kop in te drukken. Betogingen werden donderdag met grof geweld neergeslagen. Vooral jongeren gingen de straat op. Ze hielden met mobieltjes en sociale media als Twitter en Facebook contact met elkaar. Dissidente Libiërs in het buitenland moedigden hen aan.

Gedood
De Libische veiligheidstroepen en -diensten hebben de afgelopen drie dagen van protesten in het land zeker 84 mensen gedood. Dit berichtte zaterdag de organisatie Human Rights Watch (HRW). De mensenrechtenorganisatie baseert zich op telefoongesprekken met hulpverleners, ziekenhuispersoneel en ooggetuigen.

De meeste slachtoffers vielen in Benghazi. De stad ligt in het oosten van het land waar de afkeer van het regime sterker is. In Benghazi zijn laat op vrijdag nog 35 mensen door de veiligheidstroepen gedood.

De betogingen tegen de dictatuur van kolonel Kaddafi (68) in het noordoosten van Libië en naar verluidt ook in wijken van de hoofdstad Tripoli, zijn voor zover bekend de hevigste sinds hij in 1969 als majoor de macht greep. Afgezien van monarchieën is hij de langst regerende leider van een land. Hij heeft overigens geen officiële functie maar wordt onder meer als de 'Broederlijke Leider' en 'Gids van de Revolutie' aangeduid. In zijn jargon regeren 'de massa's' het land, onder meer met behulp van volkscomités en volksmilities.

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Access to the internet in Libya was cut off at 1.18am Libyan time (23.18 GMT Friday) but appears to have been partially restored by 8.01am, according to the internet monitoring service Renesys.

At the moment, spot checks of Libyan domains and traceroutes into affected networks indicate that connectivity has been restored and Libya is back on the internet.

Libya appears to be following the cue of the Egyptian authorities who cut off internet access during the protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak from the presidency.

quote:

http://truthdive.com/2011/02/16/Anonymous-hackers-release-decrypted-version-of-Stuxnet-worm-online-Security-experts.html

Washington, Feb 16 (ANI): US security experts have claimed that the computer hackers’ collective Anonymous has released a decrypted version of the Stuxnet worm that had affected Iran’s nuclear power program in December last year, online.

The ones and zeroes that make up the code called the Stuxnet worm, described as the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever created, were reportedly found when Anonymous volunteers hacked the servers of HB Gary Federal, a U.S. security company that sells investigative services to companies.

The attack was being carried out as revenge for claims by the company’s chief executive Aaron Barr that he had successfully infiltrated the cyber protest network and discovered details of its leadership and structure.

Fox News quoted security experts as saying that the leaked code was a serious cause for concern.

Insisting that the group of anonymous “hacktivists” released a decrypted version the Stuxnet worm, which could act almost like a building block for cybercrooks, Michael Gregg, chief operating officer of cybersecurity firm Superior Solutions, said: “There is the real potential that others will build on what is being released.”

“As an attacker you need to understand how something works. The better you understand how it works the easier it is to build something similar that servers the same purpose. The decompiled code the group made available is in that sense akin to a recipe book for disaster,” he said.

“With the right tools-and these guys have shown themselves more than once to be a fairly technical bunch of individuals-then it gives others a cookbook to start modifying,” Gregg added.

Careful examination of the Stuxnet worm by security analysts have shown it to be a cybermissile designed to penetrate advanced security systems. It was equipped with a warhead that targeted and took over the controls of the centrifuge systems at Iran’s uranium processing center in Natanz, and it had a second warhead that targeted the massive turbine at the nuclear reactor in Bashehr, the report said.

Dave Aitel, CEO of Immunity Inc., however, drew a fine line to distinguish between the version of the worm that destroyed Iran’s nuclear plant and the code released by Anonymous.

“What they’ve released is essentially incomprehensible,” Aitel said, adding that what the group found was far removed from the raw worm that has been “travelling around Iran destroying nuclear things.” (ANI)

quote:

Op donderdag 17 februari 2011 11:47 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
De b-sides stand:
[ afbeelding ]

quote:

We are Anonymous. We are everywhere. And we fight for freedom. We fight for free speech. We fight against censorship. Together with the citizens of the world we are strong. The actions of the regimes will not be forgotten, nor will they be forgiven.
Anonymous hears those cries, and we will assist in bringing to justice those who commit criminal acts against the innocent. We will not remain silent and let these crimes against humanity continue.

Say no to Censorship and dictatorship.

Join Us. Spread news.



Al Jazzera Live Stream

Anonymous News Network

Twitter

Anonops.tk

IRC

Anonops.ru

Arabnews

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.

quote:

andreas70 RT @AnonymousLeaks: HBGary Physical Memory Forensics for Intrusion http://cryptome.org/0003/hbg/HBG-PMF-CI.zip (zip, 2.3mb) #AnonLeaks #HBGary

quote:

andreas70 RT @AnonymousLeaks: HBGary Foreign Activity of 10.18.0.44: http://cryptome.org/0003/hbg/HBG-10-18-0-44.zip (zip, 1.7mb) #AnonLeaks #HBGary

quote:

# 6687267e-42c4-4da5-8f56-ef5e113e245b_normal aTokersInsight RT @AnonymousIRC: https://github.com/Laurelai/decompile-dump-asm | Here is another decompile of a more complete #Stuxnet binary. #HBGary #AnonLeaks about 1 hour ago via Twitterfall

quote:

Op zaterdag 19 februari 2011 22:50 schreef Golzuam het volgende:

[..]

Google translate kan dat :

quote:

ern_malleyscrub about an hour ago
Well, I realise now how wrong I've been. Hackers bad, Bible good. Okay. Thanks Hate Mongers.

quote:

Op zondag 20 februari 2011 11:12 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Westboro Babtists hebben er zin in!

http://twitpic.com/41oqa0

[ afbeelding ]

[..]

quote:

by February 20, 2011 2:00 AM EST
Let me be VERY clear - this does not originate with Anonymous, and hopefully Anon will continue to ignore them.

The Anon website which "announced" this uses free posting. This was posted by WBC.

Again - the letter from "Anonymous" to WBC was posted by WBC themselves. And within an extremely short time there was a "response", challenging Anon to come.

This is a publicity stunt by WBC. They hope triggering an attack with Anon will bring them cred. Or at least the Streisand Effect.

Please don't help WBC with this horrid attempt at publicity. Don't buy in, don't let others buy in, and do be disgusted at the lengths Phelp and co. will go for face time.

quote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/20/wikileaks-baer-tax-avoidance-hbgary

In January 2008, someone uploaded to WikiLeaks a cache of documents, including hundreds of pages of internal correspondence of a major Swiss bank, Julius Baer. On closer inspection, the cache appeared to show that large amounts of money – sums ranging from $5m to $100m per person – were being, er, shielded in the Cayman Islands from tax authorities in various jurisdictions.

It was all, of course, perfectly legal: wealthy people put capital into trusts based in the Cayman Islands. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits from investments, because legally those profits belong to the trust which, as a Cayman "resident", itself pays no tax. But the trustees can distribute money to the trust's beneficiaries, who may be residents of the UK and indeed, for all I know, pillars of society or even members of the Tory party.

Legal it may be, but mostly these folks don't like knowledge of their ingenious wheezes to enter the public domain. It's so vulgar, don't you know. And the banks that handle their money like it even less. So Julius Baer went apeshit about the leaks. Its lawyers persuaded a judge in California to shut down wikileaks.org and that, it thought, was that.

You can guess what happened. In no time at all, mirrors of the WikiLeaks site popped up everywhere. The First Amendment crowd in the US started taking an interest. Suddenly, the whole world knew about Julius Baer's wealth-management services. The California judge had second thoughts, wikileaks.org was restored and CBS News reported the decision under the headline "Free speech has a number: 88.80.13.160" – the IP address of the WikiLeaks site. And a major Swiss bank retired to lick its wounds.

What's instructive about the Julius Baer case is how clueless the bank and its agents were about the net. They looked like blind men poking a tiger with a stick. It was amusing at the time, but it was too good to last. It was inevitable that the corporate world would wise up and in the past few weeks we've begun to see some of the results of that re-education process. And it ain't pretty.

What's driving things now is the conjecture that the next big WikiLeaks exposé concerns Bank of America. And deep in the lush undergrowth of corporate America, security, consulting and PR companies have perceived lucrative business opportunities in helping putative WikiLeaks targets get their retaliation in first.

We got a glimpse of this twilight world when the activist group Anonymous hacked into the servers of an internet security firm, HBGary Federal, and posted on the internet a huge cache of internal emails. Some of these messages discuss how the firm, in conjunction with two other companies, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies, might pitch for work from the law firm that represents Bank of America and other prominent outfits.

Among the ideas discussed is a focus on WikiLeaks supporters in the media such as Glenn Greenwald of salon.com. "I think we need to highlight people like Glenn Greenwald," writes Aaron Barr of HBGary in an email dated 3 December 2010 and reproduced on salon.com. "Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH transition [in which WikiLeaks moved to another hosting service after being dropped by Amazon] and helped WikiLeaks provide information during the transition. It is this level of support we need to attack. These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals. Without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold."

One of the most interesting documents unearthed by the Anonymous attack is a PowerPoint presentation outlining the proposed pitch and the competencies of the three companies involved. Among the "Potential Proactive Tactics" is "Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document transmitters… Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward."

Since the story broke, Palantir has apologised to Mr Greenwald and severed its contacts with HBGary. Shortly afterwards Berico did the same. HBGary issued a terse, non-committal statement when withdrawing from a trade show. The company did not respond to phone and email queries about the authenticity of Mr Barr's message of 3 December.

I could go on, but you will get the point. Bank of America and its lawyers are, of course, horrified by all of this and point out that they have had nothing whatever to do with it. Which is just as well, because they may soon have their hands full dealing with other matters.

quote:

I can tell you for a fact that PR "operatives" from the US are presently controlling at least 20 fake personae for posting on the Guardian site.

Global corporations have only begun to awaken to the fact that their kissing cousins in the PRC can control the internet, and they are ready to implement the "free" version of that in the West. See this link for software that USG is purchasing for Persona Management. This system will allow a single "worker" in some PR firm in downtown Manhattan to "appear" to be ANYBODY in the world and control many dozens of ANYBODIES as they push the Corporate Line here and EVERYWHERE.

https://www.fbo.gov/index(...)b2&tab=core&_cview=1

Good bye open and free internet. Hello Great Corporate Wall.

quote:

Also you can see here that a UK company called UK Plus Logistics Services Ltd is prepared to supply this Persona Management Software to any corporation that wants it.

https://www.fbo.gov/index(...)tab=ivl&tabmode=list

Now we who post here can compete with fully ananomized and MULTIPLIED PR Operatives who are paid to snuff out any anti-corporate opinions that we might have.

quote:

The Internet "kill switch" has been removed from legislation intended to soften the blow of a catastrophic cyberattack on the United States, but civil rights activists say nothing's changed.

Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Calpers (D-DE) introduce a revised version of their cybersecurity bill this week, entitled the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act,” which they say prohibits any possibility of an Internet ‘kill switch” — they swear.

Like the original bill, which was introduced last month, this version is intended to establish an office within the Executive branch that will handle the “coordination” of governmental responses to a “catastrophic” cyber attack against the United States infrastructure, according to a statement by Sen. Collins.

“The emergency measures in our bill apply in a precise and targeted way only to our most critical infrastructure,” Sen. Collins said Thursday. “We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government finally realizes the importance of protecting our digital resources.”

If passed, the bill would give the president the ability to declare a “national cyberemergency,” which would give the government the authority to seize privately owned computer systems. What the new bill does not include, however, is the “authority to shut down the Internet” — i.e. an Internet “kill switch.”

“We want to clear the air once and for all,” said Sen. Lieberman in a statement. “There is no so-called ‘kill switch’ in our legislation because the very notion is antithetical to our goal of providing precise and targeted authorities to the president. Furthermore, it is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country.”

According to civil and technology rights activists, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), concerns over the powers granted to the federal government in the bill remain.

“The president would have essentially unchecked power to determine what services can be connected to the Internet or even what content can pass over the Internet in a cybersecurity emergency,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston tells CNet about the new bill. “Our concerns have not changed.”

Debate over the bill comes only a short time after the government of Egypt shut down nearly all access to Internet and mobile phone connections amidst anti-government protests in that country. In addition, it was reported this week that the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security accidentally shut down 84,000 domains as part of an operation to stop the exchange of child pornography and counterfeit goods.

quote:

Dear Phred Phelps and WBC Phriends,

So we've been hearing a lot about some letter that we supposedly sent you this morning. Problem is, we're a bit groggy and don't remember sending it. Our best guess is that you heard about us on that newfangled TV of yours and thought we might be some good money for your little church.

You thought you could play with Anonymous. You observed our rising notoriety and thought you
would exploit our paradigm for your own gain. And then, you thought you could lure some idiots into a honeypot for more IPs to sue.

This is not so foreign to us; as you may have heard, we trade in Lulz. You just do not have enough to offer right now.

While Anonymous thanks you for your interest, and would certainly like to take a break and have some fun with you guys, we have more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.

But, we will keep this application on file, and will certainly contact you if any openings become
available in future.

Next time, don't call us. We'll call you.

Additionally, as your "Press Release" failed to understand: When Anonymous says we support free speech, we mean it. We count Beatrice Hall among our Anonymous forebears: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Do some among our number hate you and your cynical exploitation of your human rights for monetary gain? Of course. But the MoralFags are also the first to admit that they are, in fact, your rights to exploit.

In closing, let us assure you: We are not BAWWWING sissies, nor are we afraid of your false god; we're just really busy. Stay tuned, and we'll come back to play another day.
We promise.

To the Media: Just because it was posted on AnonNews doesn't mean every single Anon is in
agreement, in fact in this case it doesn't even mean a single Anon is in agreement. Next time, if you could give us a few minutes to put all our paperwork in order, we'll be sure to let you know what we're up to. (LOL)

To Anonymous: It's a trap. They've got their ports wide open to harvest IPs to sue. Don't DDoS, and boycott Operation Westboro. If you really want to continue messing with them, just send them a few male prostitutes and faxes of goatse. Nothing more.

(Note: This letter was written by more than 20 Anons, at the same time, and none of them were inbred family members. Unlike that other, shitty "Press Release".)

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.

quote:

So, anonymous. One idiot has decided to post a press release against Westboro? I have a bad feeling about this operation. Everyone's watching us now, but this bullshit is taking away valuable resources that could be used, you know, actually fighting dictators, not failtrolls? THINK BEFORE YOU SAY SOMETHING STUPID.

But there's no way Anonymous can go back on it's word now. So, I, a good old /b/tard, will help guide you newfags to succeeding in this assault, trolling them in the best way possible, without getting pwned in the worst way possible.

RULE #1: DO NOT CONDUCT DDoSes.

Yeah, you may be thinking, WTF? Don't think I'm going full moralfag and telling Anonymous to stop. Read on.

Listen to me first. The Westboro Baptist Church are professional trolls. Not only are they the same level as /b/, they make all their money from suing people who fight back, so they're just waiting for IPs to sue. I have a bad feeling that it's all a trap, made by them so they can get some money and attention.

And it's not just that DDoSes pose a safety risk. A DDoS is useless, it's just a symbolic act. It doesn't do any damage, and it gives them undeserved media attention.

I ask you, anons, to stop and put this tactic back in the bookshelf. The costs are too high for a gain that is too low.

TL;DR: Don't DDoS. The site is likely a honeypot, it's a waste of time, and plus, we've got safer, better tactics. Read on.

RULE #2: GO CLASSIC ANON.

Now, I envy you kids with your newfangled DDoSes, and yer operations against entire countries, and your newfound lulz.

Back in my day, we didn't have that sort of thing. If we were going to do shit, it we could only ruin the lives of a single person, such as a cat abuser or an asshole like that.

Here are some of our tactics. You've heard about sending a fuckton of pizzas to people. But anon is crafty, and has a lot of other methods.

Also, here are the WBC's addresses for sending mail: http://pastebin.com/sJ8evZPA

(Note: These methods are so easy a caveman could do it. Even taking over a facebook account is just some script kiddie shit. Just remember to use a proxy or Tor, and iCall/skype for phone.)

* Send them a lots of free boxes/tampons/diapers. (skill level: NEWFAG)
* Go to some bookstore, and grab all those business reply cards, write their address, and then put it in your mailbox. (skill level: NEWFAG)
* Send them some free faxes of goatse and other shocking images (skill level: NEWFAG
* Call some prostitutes to go to their address. Preferably male. (skill level: NewFAG)
* Spam their emails with pictures of goatse, and basically this site: http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Pain_Series (skilllevel: EASY)
* Take over their facebook accounts, and then post gay porn all over it.How2RAID facebook: http://i.imgur.com/dCWQu.png (skill level: EASY)
* Send a link to a known FBI Child Predator honeypot. (Skill level: EASY)

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. More methods and how to do them are here:

http://insurgen.cc/index.php?title=Ruin_Life_Tactics

4chan's information library is here. This is anonymous's greatest repository of information.



http://www.megaupload.com/?d=pn732x0b
RULE #2: Be careful.

I have every reason to believe this was a trap. They want more people to sue, so they posted an operation to attack their site.So please, Don't DDoS. Use anon's good ol' life-ruining methods.

Stay safe, anon. And rape their asses in the most unpredicable ways possible.

quote:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/71567

According to Anonymous, Westboro Baptist Church was behind the Open Letter allegedly from Anonymous, and then added fuel to the flames with WBC's "Bring it" reply. Anonymous warns don't DDoS, it's a trap to collect IPs for suing.

Twitter is on fire with the news of an upcoming troll-on-troll feud of Anonymous vs. Westboro Baptist Church. In case you missed it - in an Open Letter, Anonymous allegedly told the anti-gay, fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church to stop the hate now or else "the damage incurred will be irreversible" and "neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover." The Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) struck back, telling Anonymous to "bring it!" and that God hates "lousy hackers."

In-between the two, this other Open Letter from Anonymous gained less attention, but told WBC that Anonymous knew it was a trap, and the short-on-money, thrive-on-attention WBC was in fact behind the first Open Letter supposedly from Anonymous.

WBC has made an awful name for themselves with their hate preaching, pushing the limits of freedom of speech with their hate speech. Many Christians find WBC's messages extremely far from Christ-like. Some would call WBC the ultimate IRL (in real life) trolls for such vile acts as provoking mourners outside of funerals for servicemen and women killed in combat. While picketing soldier's funerals, they hold signs such as "Thank God For Dead Soldiers." WBC, led by Rev. Fred Phelps, also picketed funerals of six Arizona shooting victims and are notorious for their anti-homosexual messages and "God Hates Fags" signs.

Shortly after WBC threw down the gauntlet, and Twitter was set ablaze about the oncoming war, an emergency press release was posted on AnonNews which urged Anonymous not to use DDoS attacks.

Before I could break out the popcorn and settle in to watch the fight, Anonymous News Network posted on Facebook, "V: I was just gonna ignore this for a good long while because it was a stupid call, but looks like Westboro Baptist Church (of "GodHatesFags.com" fame) wants to pick a fight with Anonymous. They're attention-whoring idiots. Meanwhile, on the IRC, a channel #OpWestboro has been started to discuss what to do. It's come down to either overwhelming force or ignoring them entirely: no middle ground."

And then, in perhaps the ultimate slap in the face or just for lulz, Anonymous seemed to yawn at WBC while telling them, "Next time, don't call us. We'll call you."

Anonymous released a press release warning others within Anonymous that it's a trap and urging them not to fall into honeypots meant gather IPs for WBC to sue. It also mentions that Anonymous supports free speech, quoting Beatrice Hall, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Who knows what may end up happening, or what WBC may do next, trolling for dollars, to try to provoke Anonymous and keep themselves in the media spotlight.

quote:

HBGary Windows Rootkit Analysis Report

This report focuses on Windows Rootkits and their affects on computer systems. We also suggest that combining deployment of a rootkit with a BOT makes for a very stealth piece of malicious software.

quote:

From: MICHAEFM
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 9:39 AM
To: 'aaron@hpgary.com'
Subject: Capabilities

Hi Aaron,
Jerry tells me you have some interesting and timely capabilities. Please call me ASAP (703)482-3107.

Regards, MFM

quote:

Incoming mail for ucia.gov is handled by two mail servers at cia.gov.

quote:

Anon_Lobo RT @tunatrawler: It's ok my fellow #anonymous. Westboro Baptish Church don't require more than just me. Go on about the good work. I got this one. Ribbit U C

quote:

Beste heer van Kralingen,

Wij zijn in staat om near-real time de hele Nederlandse social media te
monitoren, trends hierin te analyseren en de meest effectieve
contra-strategie te bepalen.

Dit kan nuttig zijn wanneer uw eigen organisatie 'onder vuur' ligt, maar
we zijn ook bereid om voor u de aanval in te zetten hoor.

Binnen onze organisatie werken mensen die professioneel werkachtig zijn op
het gebied van psy-ops (psychologische oorlogsvoering). Deze kunnen zeer
effectieve campagnes opzetten, black-ops, net waarom de klant vraagt.

Er is geen enkele restrictie aangaande de opdrachten die wij aannemen,
zolang het maar binnen de Nederlandse wet blijft. Graag promoten wij uw
religie of zetten we een haat-campagne op.

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Lxxxxxxx

> LS.
>
> "Anderszijds dreigen de rede, het fatsoen en de waarheid soms het
> onderspit te delven in een vloedgolf van "Tendentieus, ongefundeerd en
> nodeloos kwetsend" verbaal geweld."
>
> En hoe denken jullie dat probleem op te lossen? Door professioneel leugens
> te verspreiden? Kan ik gebruik maken van jullie diensten om een religie te
> pluggen? Of buitenlander-haat?
>
>
> Met vriendelijke groeten,
>
> Gerard van Kralingen.

quote:

Op maandag 21 februari 2011 20:28 schreef LXIV het volgende:

[..]

Je denkt toch zelf niet dat ik de heer van Kralingen een mailtje terugstuur zonder eerst te kijken wie dat is? Jouw fobo is de eerste hit op google bij "Gerard van Kralingen"!

quote:

Op maandag 21 februari 2011 20:41 schreef LXIV het volgende:

[..]

Je gelooft toch niet werkelijk dat het op deze manier werkt? Dat zou contra-productief zijn. Het gaat gewoon om het 'debunken' van roddels en lasters die bedrijven of andere organisaties ernstig kunnen schaden.

quote:

Op maandag 21 februari 2011 21:17 schreef LXIV het volgende:

[..]

Ik wist toch aan wie ik het stuurde!

quote:

blairisawarcrim RT @Anony_Ops: Radio Payback : Online | Now live with: proSI | Tune in @ http://bit.ly/fpHt0P #Anonymous

quote:

http://www.topix.com/religion/scientology
Actress Karla Zamudio joins Jason Beghe and director Paul Haggis in publicly departing the controversial Church of Scientology.

Ms. Zamudio’s spokesperson states “Karla left Scientology because she felt that the organization had become overbearing and actually interfered with her personal life, career, and spiritual growth.” Ms. Zamudio’s spokesperson further added “for Karla, Scientology had become more about profit and recruiting new members than helping people."

quote:

JnKhD RT @anontana: I beg everyone to please join #Anonymous IRC; we need over 9000 people right now! http://bit.ly/ica4Ji http://pastebin.com/Qsrci3wQ 9 minutes ago via web