LulzSec returns with an alleged 3 terabytes of data

 

LulzSec, anti-security hackers who branched off from Anonymous, announced its resurrection in a new YouTube video.

Originally a time-limited project, the collective nonetheless carried on past the deadline, focusing on attacks against private security forces, the FBI, and the CIA. They recently suffered severe setbacks with the revelation that Sabu, their nominal leader, was an FBI undercover operative, and the arrests of several prominent members, some of whom are suspected of having passed the Stratfor files to WikiLeaks, who then released them to the public.

The new video is brash, in typical LulzSec style, using Star Wars imagery, typography, and metaphor to identify themselves as an uncrushable rebellion. It currently boasts more than 18,000 views.

With a claimed three terabytes of data, including files from the FBI, Syrian government emails, the Department of Defence, and the Colombian prison system, LulzSec declares vengeance and may indeed have the tools to get the job done.

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Mom vs Anonymous

 

 Now, this is true mother’s love: taking on Anonymous single-handedly.

Of course, it’s always good to have Mom on your side, especially if she’s smart and witty and you’re going up against the FBI. You could ask Julian Assange about that. And now you also can also ask Jeremy Hammond.

Jeremy Hammond, aka anarchaos (and also known as: sub G, sup_g, burn, POW, yohoho, credible threat, and tylerknowsthis) is the 28-year-old Chicago hacker and member of AntiSec who was recently arrested in conjunction with the FBI raids earlier this month. Police arrested five Americans in a sweep of AntiSec’s Stratfor hackers.

The hackers released over five million largely unflattering emails from the private intelligence company Stratfor to Wikileaks, which then published them to the world as the Global Intelligence Files. Hammond is facing the potential of decades in prison on hacking, conspiracy, and fraud charges.

Rose Collins, his long-suffering mother, on Friday, took on Anonymous single-handedly to protect and avenge her son.

When told by the Chicago Tribune that Hammond had been arrested, Collins replied “Again? I love my son, but he is a genius with no brain.”

In the time-honored manner of concerned mothers everywhere, once her boy was in trouble, Collins went after the friends who had so clearly led him astray. In this case, that put her squarely up against both AntiSec and Anonymous, the hacker collective that may be beloved for rickrolling Scientology and facilitating Arab Spring, but is also feared for its anarchistic, lawless nature and its habit of attacking anyone who crosses it.

So what did this Texan single mom do? What any mother would do. She wrote them a sternly-worded note, full of insider details and a fair amount of wit.  

The letter was originally released on the Townhall Finance website, which interviewed Collins and published and edited the letter.

Rose told me that while her son detests Glenn Beck (“He called him a liar”), Jeremy confirmed to her that information that he gathered by hacking buttressed Beck’s claim that some groups, including Anonymous, are working toward trying to “bring down capitalism” in the United States. And while Collins says that her son never told her that any members of the federal government were involved “Jeremy also went to UIC and he bragged that he met with Bill Ayers.” Ayers is the controversial retired professor from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) who used to be part of the Weather Underground, a 1970s far-left radical group responsible for bombings and other criminal acts in the United States. Ayers and Barack Obama were friends in Chicago, served on the same boards and Ayers even contributed money to Obama’s first campaign.

Collins also said that Jeremy claimed that he was working with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, a black supremacist group in Chicago, as a part of his work with Anonymous, to promote an Islamic takeover of the United States.

A Letter to Anonymous

By Rose Collins*

Hi. Lulz to you. I’m Jeremy’s mom and I have a few questions. Answer them or not, but at least think about it.

1. If you are legion, do you have attorneys among you? If so, please send one to help Jeremy. I certainly don’t blame you for his behavior. He is (theoretically) an adult and knows what he is doing.

2. If you do not forget or forgive, are you in agreement with Jeremy regarding imprisonment of those convicted of crimes? He is against it for several reasons, including rehab futility, slave labor, training people for new crimes, etc. If you do feel the way he does, what will you do if/when you meet up with Sabu? Does he deserve to go to jail? If you would rip him to shreds as I have considered doing myself with my long, sharpened, poisonous, badly manicured fingernails, doesn’t that smack of the same injustices you have railed about for instance, in San Antonio? How would you be able to wear a mask superior to that of the government you detest?

3. Speaking of Sabu and our government, have you considered the possibility that Sabu himself was a victim? I cannot figure out why the feds would out him if he indeed had turned against his comrades and worked with them. It certainly won’t make protecting him any easier for them. I have seen it blamed on FoxNews, but how could they have accessed that information without a little haction on their part? And don’t you consider them liars anyway? Here’s a theory: The feds found a way to become stowaways on the Luhlzboat and got the dirt on LuhlzSec without his knowledge. And when they did arrest him, since he wouldn’t cooperate, they put the word out complete with pictures, just to distract You. In this scenario, you won’t find him because he’s busy making his little kissy-face to the fishes that are eating him piece by piece. Further, if the data stolen from Stratfor was indeed held on a server controlled by the FBI, the data is definitely compromised and therefore useless to the cause of transparency you wish.

Look, I’m a nobody and my mask is smaller than yours, as is my power. Like you, I don’t trust the government as far as I can spit a rat. Some of your shenanigans I approve of, such as the Westboro Baptist church, who gives all Christians a bad name, and the KKK morons who make all white people look like racists. But who decides what is good and bad? The government? OWS? The tea party? Westboro Baptists? You? Who are you to decide that all government secrets must be exposed? Let the wrong information out and we may all have to learn Mandarin soon. Keep working with Farakkhan’s Nation of Islam to end capitalism, and when you win that battle come over to my house and shoot me in the head, because I will never wear a burka. Better yet, free Jeremy and send him. He can even use my Baretta. He got a few luhlz when I told him that, but these people have more faith in their beliefs than I do in mine. No offense intended to Muslims, but there are those who would force their religion on a flailing nation.

My final question/point is this: I watched a video on YouTube saying that those who caused our economy to shatter for their own enrichment must pay. I totally agree! The question is, who are they? I believe (could be wrong) that you and the OWS crowd think it was the Wall Street Fat Cats. I personally believe that while their hands are not clean, they did not cause the housing crisis which was the first domino to fall. Look into history and you will see that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd (probably others too), had much more to do with it. Back in the 70s, these cartoon characters, along with ACORN and other protest professionals forced banks to give loans to people who could not pay it back or be labeled racist organizations. FYI it is no longer a race issue. My brother, who is of the peachy persuasion, also lost his house during the first year or so of the fallout. Here’s the question. How come you buy into one part of the answer, but fail to investigate other possibilities? Could it be that Anonymous is also susceptible to propaganda? I’m sure I have been as well, but I do try to see other views to a question. Can you?

Please don’t come at me bro-nonymous. I’m just trying to understand. More importantly, help my son! 

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#LulzSec was part of a #FBI play against Julian Assange 

Monsegur (Sabu) had been cooperating with the FBI since last summer. He was arrested in June and pleaded guilty in August to a dozen criminal charges. Sabu also provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of five million emails taken by LulzSec from the Texas-based, global private intelligence firm Stratfor, which are now being published by WikiLeaks.

The FBI then instructed Sabu offer LulzSec to store the Stratfor data. Then WikiLeaks began publishing the emails as the Global Intelligence Files.

Timeline of ANTISEC 2011-2012 as Introduced and Operated Under FBI Oversight

Connect the dots yourself. Was the recent reincarnation of ANTISEC run entirely under the purview of the FBI? Interestingly, the introductory announcements of ANTISEC and every single hackafter Sabu’s 7 June 2011 arrest. under the ANTISEC banner came 

Timeline of ANTISEC as Created and Operated Under FBI Supervision

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ANONYMITY SUGGESTIONS

 

Foreword:


Anonymity isn’t just using TOR or a VPN and choosing a nickname-it means literally having no name, no identity. This means you DO NOT deface websites mentioning your nickname (or that of your team, I’m looking at YOU, CharrieWong), or in any way associate the name you are using with yourself (watch your identities).

You should credit Anonymous (or give no credit) for your actions, as soon as a name is attached to you, a single slip-up is enough to get you caught. Once the Feds know there’s a group, any form of infiltration (IE having an informant) in your group will be devastating. All of your work, data, rooted boxes, infrastructure, and scraps of personal data will be going directly to the feds. This brings us to some critical suggestions that we pulled together after perusing the criminal Complaints from the alleged LulzSec / Internet Feds / Anonymous arrests.

Please read, reflect and remember them next time you feel the keen need to share a personal detail from your life with your new bff in IRC.

CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER PEOPLE - 

NEVER…


mention any political affiliations directly (don’t say I’m a registered Independent, just talk about your political views)


mention any arrests (of you, or people you know) (WE LOVE YOU JEREMY HAMMOND!)


mention any forms of IRL activism that you have participated in


tell people what you are doing at any given time, or give out specific schedule information (IE, I’m always out of the house between 5 and 7 pm)


mention your age, any previous work (citing your abilities is okay if you don’t provide much proof), height, ethnicity, or medical conditions


mention where you are, if you happen to be on vacation


inform people outside of your trusted group of any changes in IRC nicknames


mention the manufacturer of your computer (or NIC, more specifically) without changing the MAC address! (WE LOVE YOU JEREMY HAMMOND!)



**Quick note from observing Sabu: if someone disappears without prior notice for an extended period of time, and then upon coming back tries to gain access to several more groups, and attempts to build a trust-based relationship with you, said person *might* be an informant.

ADVICE FOR WOULD-BE HACKERS:




don’t attack any organizations you are in any way affiliated with (don’t DDOS your school, dumbshit! Again, looking at you CharrieWong)


don’t dump any information to a server that you didn’t witness the pwnage of. (Stratfor’s data was copied over to an FBI server)


ALWAYS use TOR/a VPN while haxing! An easy way to run pretty much anything through TOR on linux is by using proxychains or torify (‘cept nmap!)


NEVER listen for reverse shells on your own box (derp)


NEVER connect to anything even remotely related to your target using any IP addresses that are affiliated with you or a small group of people

You can read the full criminal complaints from the alleged LulzSec / Internet Feds / Anonymous arrests HERE

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Infamous international hacking group LulzSec brought down by own leader

 

Six Hackers in the United States and Abroad Charged for Crimes Affecting Over One Million Victims
Four Principal Members of “Anonymous” and “LulzSec” Charged with Computer Hacking and Fifth Member Pleads Guilty; “AntiSec” Member also Charged with Stealing Confidential Information from Approximately 860,000 Clients and Subscribers of Stratfor 

Five computer hackers in the United States and abroad were charged today, and a sixth pled guilty, for computer hacking and other crimes. The six hackers identified themselves as aligned with the group Anonymous, which is a loose confederation of computer hackers and others, and/or offshoot groups related to Anonymous, including “Internet Feds,” “LulzSec,” and “AntiSec.”

RYAN ACKROYD, a/k/a “kayla,” a/k/a “lol,” a/k/a “lolspoon”; JAKE DAVIS, a/k/a “topiary,” a/k/a “atopiary”; DARREN MARTYN, a/k/a “pwnsauce,” a/k/a “raepsauce,” a/k/a “networkkitten”; and DONNCHA O’CEARRBHAIL, a/k/a “palladium,” who identified themselves as members of Anonymous, Internet Feds, and/or LulzSec, were charged in an indictment unsealed today in Manhattan federal court with computer hacking conspiracy involving the hacks of Fox Broadcasting Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the Public Broadcasting Service (“PBS”). O’CEARRBHAIL is also charged in a separate criminal complaint with intentionally disclosing an unlawfully intercepted wire communication.

HECTOR XAVIER MONSEGUR, a/k/a “Sabu,” a/k/a “Xavier DeLeon,” a/k/a “Leon,” who also identified himself as a member of Anonymous, Internet Feds, and LulzSec, pled guilty on August 15, 2011 in U.S. District Court to a 12-count information charging him with computer hacking conspiracies and other crimes. MONSEGUR’S information and guilty plea were unsealed today. The crimes to which MONSEGUR pled guilty include computer hacking conspiracy charges initially filed in the Southern District of New York. He also pled guilty to the following charges: a substantive hacking charge initially filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of California related to the hacks of HBGary, Inc. and HBGary Federal LLC; a substantive hacking charge initially filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California related to the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment and Fox Broadcasting Company; a substantive hacking charge initially filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Georgia related to the hack of Infragard Members Alliance; and a substantive hacking charge initially filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia related to the hack of PBS, all of which were transferred to the Southern District of New York, pursuant to Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, in coordination with the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (“CCIPS”) in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Late yesterday, JEREMY HAMMOND, a/k/a “Anarchaos,” a/k/a “sup_g,” a/k/a “burn,” a/k/a “yohoho,” a/k/a “POW,” a/k/a “tylerknowsthis,” a/k/a “crediblethreat,” who identified himself as a member of AntiSec, was arrested in Chicago, Illinois and charged in a criminal complaint with crimes relating to the December 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (“Stratfor”), a global intelligence firm in Austin, Texas, which may have affected approximately 860,000 victims. In publicizing the Stratfor hack, members of AntiSec reaffirmed their connection to Anonymous and other related groups, including LulzSec. For example, AntiSec members published a document with links to the stolen Stratfor data titled, “Anonymous Lulzxmas rooting you proud” on a file sharing website.

The following allegations are based on the indictment, the information, the complaints, and statements made at MONSEGUR’s guilty plea:

Hacks by Anonymous, Internet Feds, and LulzSec

Since at least 2008, Anonymous has been a loose confederation of computer hackers and others. MONSEGUR and other members of Anonymous took responsibility for a number of cyber attacks between December 2010 and June 2011, including denial of service (“DoS”) attacks against the websites of Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, as retaliation for the refusal of these companies to process donations to Wikileaks, as well as hacks or DoS attacks on foreign government computer systems.

Between December 2010 and May 2011, members of Internet Feds similarly waged a deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation, and criminality. Members of Internet Feds engaged in a series of cyber attacks that included breaking into computer systems, stealing confidential information, publicly disclosing stolen confidential information, hijacking victims’ e-mail and Twitter accounts, and defacing victims’ Internet websites. Specifically, ACKROYD, DAVIS, MARTYN, O’CEARRBHAIL, and MONSEGUR, as members of InternetFeds, conspired to commit computer hacks including: the hack of the website of Fine Gael, a political party in Ireland; the hack of computer systems used by security firms HBGary, Inc. and its affiliate HBGary Federal, LLC, from which Internet Feds stole confidential data pertaining to 80,000 user accounts; and the hack of computer systems used by Fox Broadcasting Company, from which Internet Feds stole confidential data relating to more than 70,000 potential contestants on “X-Factor,” a Fox television show.

In May 2011, following the publicity that they had generated as a result of their hacks, including those of Fine Gael and HBGary, ACKROYD, DAVIS, MARTYN, and MONSEGUR formed and became the principal members of a new hacking group called “Lulz Security” or “LulzSec.” Like Internet Feds, LulzSec undertook a campaign of malicious cyber assaults on the websites and computer systems of various business and governmental entities in the United States and throughout the world. Specifically, ACKROYD, DAVIS, MARTYN, and MONSEGUR, as members of LulzSec, conspired to commit computer hacks including the hacks of computer systems used by the PBS, in retaliation for what LulzSec perceived to be unfavorable news coverage in an episode of the news program “Frontline”; Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which LulzSec stole confidential data concerning approximately 100,000 users of Sony’s website; and Bethesda Softworks, a video game company based in Maryland, in which LulzSec stole confidential information for approximately 200,000 users of Bethesda’s website.

The Stratfor Hack

In December 2011, HAMMOND conspired to hack into computer systems used by Stratfor, a private firm that provides governments and others with independent geopolitical analysis. HAMMOND and his co-conspirators, as members of AntiSec, stole confidential information from those computer systems, including Stratfor employees’ e-mails as well as account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers or clients. HAMMOND and his co-conspirators stole credit card information for approximately 60,000 credit card users and used some of the stolen data to make unauthorized charges exceeding $700,000. HAMMOND and his co-conspirators also publicly disclosed some of the confidential information they had stolen.

The Hack of International Law Enforcement

In January 2012, O’CEARRBHAIL hacked into the personal e-mail account of an officer with Ireland’s national police service, the An Garda Siochana (the “Garda”). Because the Garda officer had forwarded work e-mails to a personal account, O’CEARRBHAIL learned information about how to access a conference call that the Garda, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies were planning to hold on January 17, 2012 regarding international investigations of Anonymous and other hacking groups. O’CEARRBHAIL then accessed and secretly recorded the January 17 international law enforcement conference call, and then disseminated the illegally-obtained recording to others.

***

MONSEGUR, 28, of New York, New York, pled guilty to three counts of computer hacking conspiracy, five counts of computer hacking, one count of computer hacking in furtherance of fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and one count of aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum sentence of 124 years and six months in prison.

ACKROYD, 23, of Doncaster, United Kingdom; DAVIS, 29, of Lerwick, Shetland Islands, United Kingdom; and MARTYN, 25, of Galway, Ireland, each are charged with two counts of computer hacking conspiracy. Each conspiracy count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

O’CEARRBHAIL, 19, of Birr, Ireland, is charged in the indictment with one count of computer hacking conspiracy, for which he faces 10 years in prison. He is also charged in the complaint with one count of intentionally disclosing an unlawfully intercepted wire communication, for which he faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

HAMMOND, 27, of Chicago, Illinois, is charged with one count of computer hacking conspiracy, one count of computer hacking, and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

DAVIS is separately facing criminal charges in the United Kingdom, which remain pending, and ACKROYD is being interviewed today by the Police Central e-crime Unit in the United Kingdom. O’CEARRBHAIL was arrested today by the Garda.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI, and its New York Cyber Crime Task Force, which is a federal, state, and local law enforcement task force combating cybercrime, with assistance from the PCeU; a unit of New Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime Directorate, SCD6; the Garda; the Criminal Division’s CCIPS; and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Eastern District of California, the Central District of California, the Northern District of Georgia, and the Eastern District of Virginia; as well as the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs.

The charges contained in the indictment and complaints are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

 

View Full Indictment

Ackroyd, Et Al. Indictment

Ackroyd, Et Al. Indictment

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Lulzsec hacker: 'we still have Sun emails, stored in China'

 

The LulzSec hacking group hit a number of sites in a spree in May and July 2011; now its leader Sabu has given an interview on Reddit.

The hacker who styles himself "Sabu", erstwhile leader of the LulzSec hacking crew, claims to have a cache of emails copied from the Sun which are being stored on a Chinese server, along with data from a number of other hacks.

But he claimed this weekend that they will not be released yet: "there are a lot of interesting dumps we're sitting on due to timing," he wrote on his Twitter feed. He claims that hackers have broken into banks including HSBC and "a few others" but that they have found "no smoking guns yet" in the data there.

Sabu – who says his online handle is a tribute to the American professional wrestler – says that after the arrests in the UK and US of a number of people alleged to have been involved with the crew, he is effectively on the run. But his writing also suggests he is staying put where he lives.

"I'm past the point of no return. Not trying to sound like a bad ass, however, it's the truth," he wrote. Later he added: "The ironic twist will be that my own friends will take me down, and not these idiots who hide behind the patriot veil." He also says that "technically, I'm on the run, so there you go."

LulzSec was an offshoot of the Anonymous hacking collective which during a hacking spree in May and July 2011 broke into a number of sites, including Sony Pictures Europe, Fox.com, PBS and finally the News International site.

At the latter it altered the Sun's web page so that it redirected viewers first to a faked story about Rupert Murdoch's death, and then to their Twitter feed. The group also attacked the US Congress's web site, an FBI affiliate and brought down the web site for the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency by using a "distributed denial of service" attack.

Sabu effectively acted as the leader of the group, maintaining discipline over what they did, as leaked chatroom logs published in June by the Guardian show.

At that time he told members of the crew not to give interviews – but says his willingness to do so now is because "that was during the height of LulzSec. We all agreed to do no interviews till the end if there was ever one."

LulzSec's achievements, he says, were that it "exposed the sad state of security across the media, social, government online environments".

After the Sun hack, Sabu claimed on his Twitter feed that he was looking at 4GB of emails from the company. The claim was never confirmed, although remote access to News International's systems had been compromised.

Sabu's revelations came in a long and sometimes detailed "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) thread on Reddit. Sabu responds to a number of questions and appears to reveal a number of details about himself, such as that he is married, studied social sciences and English, that his technical hacking skills are self-taught, and that he teaches "sometimes". He claims to speak three languages – English, Spanish and German – fluently, and to have "decent" Portuguese and Italian. He says he turned towards computer hacking in 2000, when the US government "ignored the peoples' please to stop bombing Vieques" – a part of Puerto Rico used by the US navy as a bombing range until 2003. He says he likes working on cars, playing music and spending time with his family: "I'm loving life a lot this year. I barely have time for ops [hacker operations] like I used to."

That confirms other details that have been collected by rival hackers about Sabu which suggest that he is of Puerto Rican extraction, aged about 30 and based in New York.

He insists that he had no knowledge of the identities of any of the other members of LulzSec. "I simply don't know anyone's identity at Anonymous." He says that when one alleged member was arrested in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland, he had to go and look up its location: "I was a bit impressed, even." He vehemently denies the suggestions by some that he "snitched" on other LulzSec members to the authorities.

The breakup of LulzSec meant he has "lost too many friends. [I] will probably never talk to them ever again." But he thinks that it "has already achieved what it set out to achieve".

He suggests that one of the LulzSec members, called Avunit, who quit the group when it took aim at the FBI, "is relaxing somewhere on a boat".

Asked whether he is "safe", he replies: "no one can prove it's me anyway. The beauty of Anonymous." The closest that the authorities have come to him is when in September they arrested a hacker alleged to have gone by the online handle "Recursion", who was tracked down via logs held by the British company HideMyAss, which unwittingly provided a virtual private network (VPN) connection for the attack on Sony Pictures Europe.

That arrest was "probably the closest they ever got", Sabu says. He also makes a veiled threat against HideMyAss: he alleges it "turns out to be owned by some … people who are going around buying smaller VPN providers ... We should have a nice exposé for HMA and its mother computer/investors soon. Point is: research your VPN provider thoroughly."

He says he takes a number of precautions to evade law enforcement, using prepaid phones and BlackBerrys for calls and Twitter: "they're expendable. I don't ignore you, I simply don't know you." He trusts Twitter – to some extent: "believe it or not, Twitter has not been sleeping in bed with LEAs [law enforcement agencies]. In fact it's a process [for LEAs] to get account info."

He rails at the sentencing guidelines in place for computer activity: "The penalties for any cybercrime (with the exception of child pornography) is severely archaic. And enforced by non-computer users. A DDOS (distributed denial of service) should not [attract a sentence of] 10 years at all especially when rapists and murderers do LESS than time." (The Guardian's James Ball made a similar point earlier this year.)

He thinks a hacking attack against Facebook "is pointless unless some very courages [sic] individual go and burn down its datacenter containing DBs [databases]". But he calls Facebook "a serious global cancer … they have half a billion people's psychology and family down in a database".

LulzSec does not have a Google Plus account, he says: "We do NOT have a g+ account. So whoever is running it is more than likely posing and has no affiliation to us." (Other Reddit users said that files distributed from that account contain malware.) Google Plus was launched well after LulzSec apparently broke up.

His advice to would-be emulators: "Stick to yourselves. If you are in a crew – keep your opsec up 24/7. Friends will try to take you down if they have to."

Anonymous, he says, is "no leaders, no hierarchy, no cointelpro [counter-intelligence program] drama. And we are a living, moving mass of like-minded individuals." He says it is "pure democracy", though that can be anarchic. But he thinks it will spawn "many organizations and political parties". But he says that "you don't need to be 'anonymous' or need to hack to be Anonymous. It's an idea, not a job."

He says he hopes to give a talk at the next HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York, expected to run in July 2012.

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Call For Anonymous & LulzSec Hackers To Help With Occupy Wall Street

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LulzSec and Anonymous police and FBI investigation sees two more arrested

 

Two men arrested in South Yorkshire and Wiltshire as part of investigation into international online hacking gangs

LulzSec, which uses this logo, and Anonymous are being investigated by UK police and the FBI over claims the online groups hacked websites.

Two men have been arrested in connection with online attacks by hacking gangs Anonymous and LulzSec, Scotland Yard said.

The men, aged 24 and 20, were arrested on Thursday in Mexborough, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and Warminster, Wiltshire, for conspiring to commit offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Scotland Yard said the arrests were part of a continuing investigation in collaboration with the FBI, South Yorkshire Police and other law enforcement bodies, into activities of Anonymous and LulzSec, especially in connection with suspected offenses under the cover of online identity "Kayla".

A spokesman said the men were arrested separately. He said the Doncaster address was searched by police and computer equipment was removed for forensic examination.

Detective Inspector Mark Raymond from the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), said: "The arrests relate to our inquiries into a series of serious computer intrusions and online denial-of-service attacks recently suffered by a number of multi-national companies, public institutions and gPressovernment and law enforcement agencies in Great Britain and the US.

"We are working to detect and bring before the courts those responsible for these offenses, to disrupt such groups, and to deter others thinking of participating in this type of criminal activity."

In a separate investigation two men were charged on Thursday over online attacks by Anonymous, Scotland Yard said.

Christopher Weatherhead, 20, from Northampton, and Ashley Rhodes, 26, from Kennington, south London, have been charged with conspiracy to carry out an unauthorized act in relation to a computer.

Police had already charged a youth from Chester aged 17 and student Peter David Gibson, 22, from Hartlepool, in relation to the same offences.

All four will appear on bail at City of Westminster Magistrates Court on September 7.

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AntiSec hackers target Vanguard Defense exec

 

The hacktivist group AntiSec says it has released a gigabyte of private documents from Vanguard Defense Industries, including e-mails from an executive connected with a cybersecurity organization it has targeted previously. 

In a post on Pastebin this morning, AntiSec said the e-mails belong to Richard Garcia, a senior vice president at Vanguard who is also a board member at InfraGard, an FBI program that teams up public and private cybersecurity efforts. In June, AntiSec affiliate LulzSec hacked the Web site of InfraGard Atlanta, releasing passwords and other sensitive information.

Describing InfraGard as "a sinister alliance," AntiSec gloated about this latest breach:

It is our pleasure to make a mockery of InfraGard for the third time, once again dumping their internal meeting notes, membership rosters, and other private business matters.

Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things as we did not have time to follow up on all the data. Safe to say, that despite previous disclosure in the media...Mr. Garcia did not bother to change any of his many many passwords found in his spool at the time of this release. So here's also a shoutout to all Lulz Lizards still following our mischiefs: Have fun with the data of Mr. Garcia, former Assistant Director to the L.A. FBI office who now sells his cybersecurity "skills" to the Military and Government for brazen amounts of money.

Vanguard, based in Conroe, Texas, makes an unmanned aerial vehicle called the ShadowHawk, used in commercial as well as law enforcement and military settings, and also provides security consulting services.

AntiSec said the new breach was perpetrated "not only to cause embarrassment and disruption to Vanguard Defense Industries, but to send a strong message to the hacker community" that it will continue to target military contractors, law enforcement agencies, and "white hat sellouts," a reference to hackers who work with police and other establishment groups.

Earlier this month, AntiSec issued a "Shooting Sheriffs Saturday Release" of what it said was 10GB of data stolen from U.S. law enforcement agencies, including private e-mails, passwords, data from informants, Social Security numbers, and credit card information.

Update 10:24 a.m.: In a phone conversation with CNET, Vanguard CEO Michael Buscher said the company had determined that there was no breach of its servers or Web site, but rather that it was Garcia's personal Gmail account that was accessed.

Nothing in the the material that was released by AntiSec involved sensitive data from Vanguard, or proprietary or customer information, Buscher said. The approximately 1GB of information, he said, centered primarily on Garcia's role at InfraGard. 

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Has Lulzsec's leader, Sabu, finally been revealed?

 

In response to an article questioning whether Lulzsec's leader, Sabu, was a Twenty-first Century Billy The Kid, information has come to light which poses the question, has his true identity been revealed? There have been several attempts at identifying Sabu, with the resulting information being, apparently, incorrect. However, the latest attempt at Doxing him (posting his private identity details online) has coincided with him going to ground.

Referenced information dates back some ten years and points the finger at a Puerto Rican man living in New York. It goes far beyond what has previously been published but, being uncorroborated, we can't post the details on this site.

Information was gathered using social engineering meaning that apparent references to him on various websites have led to leads on other websites which have linked back to original sources. In short, someone's past has caught up with them. The published documents show "mind maps" on how the evidence stacks up.

What is certain is that shortly after the "dox" were posted Sabu went to ground. Any imminent, forthcoming, high-profile arrest will indicate either that Sabu has truly been identified and that an internet paper trail, no matter how obscure, can be used to track somebody by anyone with enough patience and dedication, or that once again Sabu has given the authorities and his dissenters the slip.

This time, one suspects, we need not wait so long to have the answer.

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Defcon panel: Anonymous is here. 

LulzSec is here. They’re 

everywhere

 

A panel at Defcon that focused on the hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec was as confusing, chaotic and free-wheeling as the organizations themselves. The panel included a masked man, introduced as Baron von Arrr,  who spoke with authority about Anonymous, but, upon a request from the audience, he unmasked himself as a security expert and blogger who wasn’t speaking for Anonymous.

The debate was itself a theatrical microcosm of the whole problem of identifying members of Anonymous, or LulzSec, and prosecuting them for committing various hacking crimes such as shutting down web sites. Law enforcers, some who were presumably in the audience, are faced with the question of whom to arrest as the “leadership” of a groups, which have (reportedly) attacked everyone from the Church of Scientology to Sony. No one can admit to being a leader of Anonymous, since he or she would be subject to arrest for bringing down the web sites of so many companies this year. That makes the idea of putting a “leader” of Anonymous on a panel a little problematic.

The discussion focused on whether the cyber vigilantism of the groups was justified or not, particularly when the group attacked Aaron Barr, the (former) chief executive of the law firm HBGary Federal, whose actions raised the ire of the hacktivist groups. Barr himself, who was described by comedian Stephen Colbert as finding a hornet’s nest and “sticking his penis in it,” was in the audience. Barr was slated to be on the panel, but HBGary Federal lawyers threatened to sue him and he dropped out. After Barr, the star panelist, dropped out, the panel decided to put a masked man (pictured above and unmasked below as blogging and security expert Kryptia, who was not speaking for Anonymous) on the stage to draw more attention.

The discussion and the Q&A that followed were heated. Josh Corman, research director of the enterprise  security practice at the 451 Group (market analyst firm) and a member of the panel, said he looked at the sometimes juvenile, sometimes ineffective actions of Anonymous and said he wanted to see the group “build a better Anonymous,” one that, for instance, could take down child exploitation web sites.

“We could all get behind that,” Corman said. “Whistleblowing can be an important part of our culture. But who is Anonymous? It was hijacked.”

But then some members of the audience felt that Corman and fellow panelist “Jericho,” a hacker at Attrition.org, of encouraging vigilantism that would lead to a decline of freedom of speech, rather than a defense of it.

Jericho said,”I did not say that I wanted to limit freedom of speech.” Some of the attacks actually produce greater transparency, rather than censorship, because they expose data that the public should know about. Kryptia said, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Jericho, on the other hand, definitely said that HBGary Federal should be “taught another lesson” for trying to keep Barr off the panel — a statement that some said he was advocating an attack on them.

Kryptia noted that the cost of hacker insurance has gone up and that might lead executives to enforce better security practices at their companies when it comes to handling private information for people. That might be a good thing. On the other hand, the exposure of the private information of people such as criminal investigators could put their lives in danger.

The discussion about Barr ranged from sympathy for him because he was attacked and had his private information exposed and because he lost his job from the clash with Anonymous. The hacking group targeted him and HBGary Federal earlier this year, exposing thousands of confidential company documents. The group was angered after Barr told the Financial Times his plans to divulge the identities of the leadership of Anonymous. The attack also exposed HBGary Federal’s plans to collaborate with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to target progressive groups with a misinformation campaign. Barr resigned after that, but he was apparently willing to talk at the panel until he was threatened with the suit.

The room included hundreds of hackers and well as federal agents (one who said he was from the Department of Defense). And a number of times, people said there were many members of Anonymous in the audience. When I thought about it, there was no way to verify any of that.

Paul Roberts, moderator of the panel and editor of Kaspersky Labs’ ThreatPost.com, said, “It is all nebulous.”

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At a Hacker Conference, Plenty of Friendly Feds

LAS VEGAS — Why are the Feds hobnobbing with hackers?

Defcon, a convention of computer hackers here, was crawling with federal agents on Friday. They smiled, shook hands, handed out their business cards, spoke on a panel called “Meet the Federal Agent 2.0″ and were really, really nice.

Naturally, the Feds have been hanging out at hacker gatherings for years for the purposes of snooping. “Cloak and dagger,” as one federal agent put it.

This time they came with another purpose: to schmooze, impress and, perhaps ultimately, lure. The United States Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s Internet defense arm, “has a workforce issue,” said Daron Hartvigsen, special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. “We have needs that some in this community can solve. We need folks with skills.”

Government agencies especially need computer professionals with cybersecurity skills.

At Defcon, these skills were in ample supply — and they can alternately thrill and scare. There were hackers and lockpickers here, problem solvers, troublemakers and assorted geeks. There were attendees with mohawks and blue hair, and some with blue mohawks. One wore a cape. A few wore kilts. Those without tattoos seemed to be in a minority. And most, whether out of fear or conceit, insisted on using their digital nicknames rather than their real ones: LosT, alien, Abstract.

In their midst were Internet crime investigators representing the Army, Navy, Air Force and NASA. The Federal Bureau of Investigation set up a recruiting table at a related conference of security professionals earlier in the week. An official from the National Security Agency was scheduled to speak to next-generation hackers at a two-day event called Defcon Kids on Saturday.

For the Feds, it seemed less an aggressive recruiting drive than a public diplomacy mission. They spoke about their computer science degrees. They took pains to describe themselves as lovable geeks under their crew cuts. Ryan Pittman, an ex-cop who now works cyber cases in the U.S. Army’s criminal investigations division, said the convention was an opportunity to whittle away the Feds’ image as “jackbooted thugs.” Ahmed Saleh, a cyber crimes investigator with NASA, described a job that might be appealing “if you’re a geek and you wanna catch the bad guys.”

There seemed to be plenty of receptive hackers. Christine Banek, a 29-year-old software programmer with plum-colored hair, sidled up to Mr. Saleh after the panel and asked if his agency was still hiring. She said she had applied online and had not heard back. “If they were offering, I would totally take it,” she said. Later, she suggested aloud that the government legalize marijuana. Positive drug tests generally disqualify a candidate from a law enforcement position.

The audience had many questions. What do you do if you’re asked to do something you’re morally opposed to? Mr. Saleh said he had never been put in that situation, but that an employee at Starbucks could face a similar dilemma. (Really, on the morality of soy lattes?) Do you use informants in cyber cases, as you would in other cases? Yes. Do the Feds attack the computer systems of suspects? No. How seriously do the Feds take Lulz Security, the loose-knit cyber vigilante group under the F.B.I.’s scanner lately for attacking government and corporate Web sites, asked a young man from Sacramento. Mr. Hartvigsen said it would not be prudent to comment on an active case, offering only: “We investigate folks who break the law.”

One could be forgiven for wondering whether the Feds might feel compelled to do a bit of cloak-and-dagger at the conference too. After all, there was some braggadocio from self-described members of the hacking collectives that are under investigation. One prominent member, who goes by the nickname Sabu, posted taunts on Twitter Friday afternoon, suggesting, probably falsely, that the Feds were unwittingly hobnobbing

with him too at DefCon. He wrote: “LOL to the two Feds that came to the booth.”

 

 

 

 

 

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UN, 71 other networks hacked - McAfee

 

A leading computer security firm has used logs produced by a single server to trace the hacking of more than 70 corporations and government organizations over many months, and experts familiar with the analysis say the snooping probably originated in China.

Among the targets were the Hong Kong and New York offices of the Associated Press, where unsuspecting reporters working on China issues clicked on infected links in e-mail, the experts said.

Other targets included the networks of the International Olympic Committee, the United Nations secretariat, a U.S. Energy Department lab, and a dozen U.S. defense firms, according to a report released Wednesday by McAfee, a security firm that monitors network intrusions around the world.

McAfee said hundreds of other servers have been used by the same adversary, which the company did not identify.

But James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “the most likely candidate is China.” The target list’s emphasis on Taiwan and on Olympic organizations in the run-up to the Beijing Games in 2008 “points to China” as the perpetrator, he said. “This isn’t the first we’ve seen. This has been going on from China since at least 1998.”

Another computer expert with knowledge of the study, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of reluctance to blame China publicly, said the intrusions appear to have originated in China. McAfee dubbed the intrusions “Operation Shady RAT,” with the acronym standing for “remote access tool.”

The intruders were after data on sensitive U.S. military systems, the McAfee report says, as well as material from satellite communications, electronics, natural gas companies and even bid data from a Florida real estate company. Forty-nine of the 72 compromised organizations were in the United States.

“We’re facing a massive transfer of wealth in the form of intellectual property that is unprecedented in history,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president of threat research. He would not name the private entities targeted, but said McAfee helped half a dozen of them investigate intrusions.

Some of the intrusions — such as one into the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal — are continuing, he said. Spokesmen for that organization and for the International Olympic Committee said they were not aware of the intrusions. A U.N. spokesman said technicians analyzing the logs have not seen evidence of stolen data. The Energy Department had no comment.

According to the report, which does not identify the AP by name, the organization’s New York office was targeted in August 2009 in an intrusion that lasted, on and off, for eight months. Its Hong Kong bureau was penetrated at the same time, in an intrusion that continued for 21 months.

AP spokesman Jack Stokes said the company was aware of the report. “We do not comment on network security,” he said.

The Associated Press has been targeted before. A March 2009 report by Canadian researchers about allegations of Chinese espionage against the Tibetan community found that computer systems in AP offices in Hong Kong and Britain had been compromised.

McAfee had been aware for years of a “command and control” server located in a Western country that was used to control malware deployed on target computers. But the firm just recently discovered that the hackers had made a tradecraft mistake, configuring the server to generate logs that identified every Internet protocol address the server had controlled since 2006.

Google’s disclosure early last year that hackers in China had broken into its networks and stolen valuable source code was a watershed moment: A major U.S. company volunteered that it had been hacked. Google also said that more than 20 other large companies were similarly targeted.

Scott Borg, chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a research group, has assessed the annual loss of intellectual property and investment opportunities across all industries at $6 billion to $20 billion, with a big part owing to oil industry losses. These firms spend hundreds of millions of dollars to explore oil fields before bidding on them, Borg said.

One measure of pain came recently when EMC Corp. disclosed that it had taken a $66 million charge to cover remediation costs associated with a March intrusion of its RSA division. That intrusion, which industry experts say appeared to have originated in China, resulted in the compromise of RSA’s SecurID computer tokens that companies and governments worldwide use to log on remotely to workplace systems.

As a result of the compromise, at least a dozen major financial institutions are switching to other vendors, said Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at Cigital, a security firm that works with banks. Stina Ehrensvard, chief executive of YubiKey in Palo Alto, Calif., said at least 25 firms have switched to YubiKey or are testing its token as a result of the RSA breach.

 

 

 

 

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Anonymous: Operation Paperstorm - August 13^th

 

Topiary Posters

-http://i.imgur.com/ahKMyh.png - Free Topiary Banner

-http://i.imgur.com/1XNEUh.jpg - Free Topiary Poster (+#Antisec)

-http://i.imgur.com/qgafHh.jpg - Topiary IRL pic for Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/mnGJlh.jpg - Free Topiary Poster w/ Wiki emblem 

Lulzsec and Various Posters

-http://i.imgur.com/Yx2rzh.png - Revolution/Lulzsec Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/XpcThh.jpg - ‘Together we are strong!’ Protest Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/m9ccWh.jpg - #Antisec recruitment Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/WtupHh.jpg - Basic #Antisec Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/oQ5OJh.jpg - #Antisec Poster/Banner

-http://i.imgur.com/zogMSh.jpg - #Antisec Justice Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/X5bykh.jpg - #Antisec Uncle Sam (Fuck the system) Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/uwXVPh.jpg - Civil Empowerment Poster

-http://i.imgur.com/lfeBKh.jpg - #Antisec Emblem

PRIORITY OPERATION: #FreeTopiary - August 29th

Poster  the entire route he will take to the court appearance on Aug 30th with  Anonymous AND LulzSec banners, show him he’s not alone, he has  supporters, brighten his day!!!

SECONDARY OPERATION: #FreeTopiary - All August

Post these around your town. Post pictures and video on social media sites. Send Video to @YourAnonNews and we’ll post them here. 

The address for the court is 

1 English Grounds

(off Battlebridge Lane)

Southwark 

London 

England  

SE1 2HU

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