Hoglund's Anonymous Conspiracy Theory

lulzgasm · Mar 22, 2011

http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...light_on_Anonymous?taxonomyId=16&pageNumber=1

For realz. The dude sounds as whacked as the CoS.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

CSO - On Super Bowl weekend, HBGary CTO Greg Hoglund found himself locked out of his own email account. The fallout of the leaked messages from his account and that of HBGary Federal's CEO Aaron Barr has been widely reported. Yet, not from the point of view of the victims. In Part 1 of this interview with CSO correspondent Robert Lemos, Hoglund talked about how the hack happened and the lessons for chief security officers. In Part 2, he describes his research on Anonymous and why the group is making the insider threat problem more dire.
You said initially that Anonymous was not even on your radar. Why is that?Hoglund: We at HBGary were focused almost entirely on some APTs (advanced persistent threats), mostly focused on China. And that has been the bulk of our research for quite a while because most of our customers have suffered attacks from, what appears to be, state sponsored Chinese intelligence. It's espionage stuff, so we were heads down on that.
We were blindsided by the Anonymous attack. I did not expect to be attacked by what I thought was a bunch of kids who DDOS websites offline. Granted, DDOS is illegal. I believe that here in the United States its a 10-year prison sentence, so its no small crime, either. Most people don't think of it as a crime, they think of it as a virtual sit in. So people don't take it seriously, me included.
So after the attack, you started focusing on Anonymous and researching their organization?I took all our resources and just turned them directly onto Anonymous, and we found all this information about the group. And what I learned is that they are not at all what people think they are. There aren't very many, first of all. There are not thousands, they are not a legion. That is all just stuff they say to make people fearful or intimidate. They have a whole propaganda wing. So lets get this straight: A lot of the people in Anonymous are pseudo-journalists, they write the news. They completely use the media as a tool.
So what did your research find? What is Anonymous doing?There are a dozen people at the center of Anonymous. Most of those people are criminal hackers. And they are not just attacking HBGary, they are attacking numerous defense contractors who are in the defense industrial base and system integrators for the government. They are attacking numerous companies in the pharmaceutical space and the chemical space. They are attacking U.S. corporations.
They are singling out individuals within the defense establishment. We are talking about stuff where they are targeting people who are part of the Department of Defense or the intelligence community. Literally, they are putting all their personal information into planning documents -- they are targeting these people. They are going after people's family and children. They actually have all the family members listed. And they call them up on the phone. They harass them. There have been cases where death threats have been left. It's just ridiculous, and it's completely unacceptable. I had no idea about any of this before I was attacked.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

For companies, you see the danger of Anonymous not in hactivism but in corporate espionage? As an insider threat?The biggest threat to your intellectual property is your front door. Anonymous is one platform for leaking information. Anonymous is one group. There is Anonleaks. There is Wikileaks. There is CrowdLeaks.
There is a trend to recruit insider threats. And that is something that CISOs need to be aware of. There is a platform by which someone can be an insider threat, and supply information supposedly in an anonymous fashion. Even though insider threats are always there as a potential problem, they are actually exacerbating the problem. There may be more insider threats now because of this.
While Wikileaks isn't journalism, it does do a function of journalism well -- keeping sources anonymous. Is that not valuable?There is a difference between someone willing giving information to Wikileaks, and a cyber thuggery group criminally hacking into computers and stealing that data. That's two totally separate things.
Let's be clear here, Anonymous is not protecting Wikileaks. Anonymous is a group that hacks criminally into systems, and we are talking about probably over five corporations that I know of right now in the United States that are being actively targeted by them. When they get access, they are going to steal the data off those system, e-mail, files off the file system, they are going to do everything they can, and then they are going to leak it and manipulate it and create stories about it. Basically, that is their platform.
That is something every single CISO should be scared of. They should definitely be aware of it and mitigating it.
Read more about network security in CSOonline's Network Security section.

Discernment · Mar 22, 2011

"...they are going to do everything they can, and then they are going to leak it and manipulate it and create stories about it. Basically, that is their platform.

Clearly there is no manipulation in this story.

Ersatz · Mar 22, 2011

Damage control 101 ala the cult.
Fail.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Hey Gary, didn't Aaron tell you to expect a DDoS attack in an email? Lying liar lying.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Feed hoglund to the chans ? Sounds like he is touting someone else's message anyway

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

I hope he is right.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Feed hoglund to the chans ?

really even the chans have stomachs that strong?

anonymous612 · Mar 22, 2011

Most of those people are criminal hackers.

Dox or gtfo, Hoglund.

Boy needs to learn that if he wants to make an accusation like that he either needs to provide evidence to the police or go back to his corner and shut the fuck up.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

anonymous612 said: ↑

Dox or gtfo, Hoglund.

Boy needs to learn that if he wants to make an accusation like that he either needs to provide evidence to the police or go back to his corner and shut the fuck up.

Word.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Anonymous said: ↑

really even the chans have stomachs that strong?

Yes maybe the chans have lost their power

Avro Arrow · Mar 22, 2011

I'd feel better if we had https here.

JohnnyRUClear · Mar 22, 2011

Anonymous said: ↑

Anonymous is one group. ... a cyber thuggery group ... Anonymous is a group

I knew it! It IS a group!

HellRazor · Mar 22, 2011

Hoglund - what a douche.

LocalSP · Mar 22, 2011

JohnnyRUClear said: ↑

I knew it! It IS a group!

Shuddap about it will ya or you're out of the group.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

If anonymous is a group?
Where are the group hugs?

DeathHamster · Mar 22, 2011

HellRazor said: ↑

Hoglund - what a douche.

I can see how Aaron managed to get hired and pass his review period.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Anonymous said: ↑

Feed hoglund to the chans?

Michael Gregory Hoglund, 37 years old, married to Penelope (Penny) Leavey Hoglund, 47. Nice house, Michael.

http://www.redfin.com/CA/El-Dorado-Hills/1294-Terracina-Dr-95762/home/22378138

DeathHamster · Mar 22, 2011

I almost hope that he names some names of these claimed "criminal hackers", and then is surprised to find that (a) they aren't criminal hackers, (b) they're not teen-aged basement dwellers, (c) they can afford lawyers, (d) see you in court for defamation, loser.

LastOneStanding · Mar 22, 2011

. In Part 2, he describes his research on Anonymous and why the group is making the insider threat problem more dire.

dude.. since when did we become insiders of anything... if so i want my super seekrit special insider badge nao!

They have a whole propaganda wing

since when did this happen?!? seriously anon needs to hire a secretary to let us all know when we get neat things like a propaganda wing and super seekrit special insider badges and whatnot!

in conclusion:
how much hornet abuse can a dick take before it completely falls off?
apparently this is a lesson Greg Hoglund has yet to figure out.

AnonLover · Mar 22, 2011

the bigger they are, the harder they baaawwwwwwwwwlwwlllll

DeathHamster · Mar 22, 2011

They have a whole propaganda wing

We're not legion, but we have propaganda wing.

Interesting.

whosit · Mar 22, 2011

It is amusing to see marblecake 2.0. Either that or it is delusions from some bitter people passing it along to Hoglund (obviously not Jewish - to much pork in the name). Fuck, I thought we already saw enough drama a couple of years ago. I guess not.

popcorn

Ann O'Nymous · Mar 22, 2011

Strange on many respects.

Anonymous · Mar 22, 2011

Havelock Vetinari is the leader of Anonymous.

Ann O'Nymous · Mar 22, 2011

http://www.csoonline.com/article/677340/hbgary-s-hoglund-identifies-lessons-in-anonymous-hack

HBGary's Hoglund identifies lessons in Anonymous hack
Companies need to make sure that they are protecting their cloud assets, not just their networks, the beleaguered CTO of HBGary says.
By Robert Lemos

March 17, 2011 — CSO — On Superbowl Sunday, HBGary CTO Greg Hoglund found himself locked out of his own e-mail account. As has since beenwidely reported in the media, the hacking group Anonymous leaked thousands of e-mail messages from the accounts of Hoglund and HBGary Federal's CEO Aaron Barr, chastising the company in a public statement. In this excerpt of an interview with CSO correspondent Robert Lemos, Hoglund admits that the company made many mistakes in defending its data, but refutes some of the details of the hack and highlights lessons that other companies should take to heart.
Also see: Teenage rampage: What Anonymous can teach us about the youth
You've said that much of the information in the media about the hack is wrong. What happened?
Hoglund: They didn't get anywhere close to our network. As far as I could tell, they were not even aware of its existence. They may have become aware of it by reading the e-mails later but that was well after the fact. They only got access to our e-mail spool, which was hosted at Google, and its cloud based e-mail service. And they got access via a stolen password, so they were able to log in. There was really no "hack" involved; it was a stolen credential. (Editor's note: They also had some access to HBGary Federal's, a related company, hosted Web site and Barr's Twitter account.)
You were on the phone with Google as Anonymous was stealing your data?
Yes, I was trying to get Google to shut the site down. Google was trying to get me to put a file on my Web site (to authenticate my identity). You see the chicken-and-egg problem there. (HBGary had pulled its site down.)
Anyone with a cloud-based service needs to have an SLA (software license agreement) in the contract that says there is a priority, security hotline so that when there is a security event you have priority support, rather than what happened to me, which is that I got round-robinned to what appeared to be a call center in India. And I'm waiting on the phone and I can't do the technical magic tricks, jumping through the hoops that Google wanted me to jump through, to get them to listen to me. It took me forever to get technical staff on the phone on Sunday afternoon, so they could make the necessary changes so that Google would even start talking to me. And meanwhile, they are downloading my e-mail spool.
I would warn any CISO who is considering cloud in their future to make sure that never happens to them, and that is a contractual thing in the service level agreement.
What other suggestions do you have for companies?
Set an e-mail retention policy and don't store your entire e-mail archive in the cloud. You can store it locally somewhere in the corporate environment, so you can still access it for doing your daily work, looking up data as well as for e-discovery purposes, but it shouldn't be stored in an accessible location out in the cloud.
Second, enable two-factor authentication. Anything that requires a log-in should be enabled for two-factor authentication. If I had enabled two-factor authentication for Google apps that I had HBGary subscribed to, then these hackers from Anonymous would not have been able to log in.
It was a newly available option, but we hadn't enabled it. The cost of two-factor authentication is significantly lower today than it has been in the past. It doesn't cost much, so anybody using the cloud should enable two factor, it it's an option. If they have any services on the road, such as sales people or technical people, they should have two-factor authentication.
Another thing they should do is configure IP restriction on any administration of the site. So, you should only have one administrator account and it should be IP restricted to a single location. And then if you have a compromise, you don't have to worry about someone getting access to the administrative parts of the cloud services.

whosit · Mar 22, 2011

Ann O'Nymous said: ↑

Strange on many respects.

Not sure if it is strange. Not good would be the way I would look at it. Someone is going to get fucked, or everyone is going to get fucked.

Ann O'Nymous · Mar 22, 2011

http://blogs.csoonline.com/1429/teenage_rampage_what_anonymous_can_teach_us_about_the_youth

Teenage rampage: What Anonymous can teach us about the youth
by CSO, Salted Hash – IT security news analysis, over easy!

Thu, 2011-03-17 13:20
Topic(s): Data Protection

Recent speculation in the infosec community is that the Anonymous attacks against HBGary have been fueled by some youthful energy.
For this one, some music is appropriate:

The security community has been particularly obsessed with Anonymous since the attack on HBGary. At last month's RSA conference, HBGary abandoned the showroom floor after its booth was vandalized, apparently by one or more people behind Anonymous, which has been on a crusade against anyone who has taken a stand against WikiLeaks.
Every time I visited the press room, people were buzzing about who was behind anonymous. Was it a security vendor in disguise? Was it someone who might be in the press room listening in on all the speculation?
I even detected some fear in the air. People were worried that if someone from Anonymous heard them talking about it, they would be the next target.

Last night I stumbled upon an article in Infosec Island that suggested a teenage girl played a central role in the attacks.
Here's an excerpt:
Parmy Olson has posted an article on Forbes alleging that a sixteen year old girl who works part-time at a salon may have been the key to the HBGary Federal breach that rocked the information security community.

The HBGary Federal breach was conducted by the rogue movement Anonymous, and the subsequent release of tens-of-thousands of company emails revealed multiple instances of ethically questionable covert operations involving the security company.
Olson writes that she has been in contact with a young hacker known only as "Kayla" who claims to have conducted the social engineering exploit that made the HBGary Federal breach so successful.
Olson writes: "Kayla played a crucial role, posing as Barr to an IT administrator (who happened to be Nokia security specialist Jussi Jaakonaho) to gain access to the company’s servers... [Kayla] and four other hackers broke into his company’s servers... defacing his Web site, purging data and posting more than 50,000 of his emails online for the world to see, all within the space of 24 hours."
The article goes on to describe how the teen, supposedly the daughter of a software engineer, taught herself to hack by reading books and was able to program in C and x86 by the time she was fourteen years old.

Olson admits that she does not have much to go on in the way of proof regarding the validity of Kayla's story - only citing other Anonymous members as support - which makes it surprising that Forbes' editors ran the story at all.
Whether the story is true or not, the fact that a teenage girl could be involved doesn't surprise me. Hacking tools are so easy to acquire online and so easy to use that pretty much anyone can launch an attack if they have the time and motivation.
My friend George V. Hulme wrote a story recently about one such tool: LOIC (the Low Orbit Ion Cannon). He wrote:
How was it that a loosely-coupled group of cyber-protestors could launch -- with varying degrees of success -- targeted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against sites such as MasterCard, PayPal, PostFinance, and the website belonging to a Swedish prosecutor?

Turns out it's quite simple. All an attacker need do is download the open source network stress testing tool known as LOIC (the Low Orbit Ion Cannon) that is widely available. Launching an attack with LOIC is mind-numbingly easy: just point and shoot. LOIC will then flood the target with HTTP requests, UDP and TCP packets.
Those participating in the pro-Wikileaks riots could operate on their own, or choose to connect their system to the "LOIC Hivemind" voluntary botnet that is centrally controlled by those behind Operation Payback.

Since the launch of the attacks, LOIC has been downloaded nearly 70,000 times.
Some readers suggested the role of LOIC was overstated; that there are many more tools that are in wider use. But the central point -- that it's becoming easy for just about anyone to launch a DDoS -- held up.

The Infosec Island article ends with some interesting and valid points:
--If the article is on track, it is a fascinating portrayal of the makeup of the Anonymous movement.--If it turns out to be pure obfuscation, it reveals something about the nature of the Anonymous methodologies.
--If it is all a hoax, it shows how vulnerable the Anonymous movement and the media are to manipulation.
My parting thought is this: If a group like Anonymous is having so much success on the backs of the youth, maybe there's a lesson in it for the good guys.
Maybe we should be in the shopping malls recruiting some of these kids to fight fire with fire. If a cause like defending WikiLeaks is enough to feed a teen-age rampage against the likes of HBGary, surely there are kids out there who are equally passionate about defending cyberspace from this sort of thing.
Today's youth spend more time in cyberspace than in the real world, it seems. It's almost like a second home.
In their minds, working for the good guys could be their way of protecting their homes.
It's a thought, anyway.
--Bill Brenner

lulzgasm · Mar 22, 2011

"Today's youth spend more time in cyberspace than in the real world, it seems. It's almost like a second home.
In their minds, working for the good guys could be their way of protecting their homes.
It's a thought, anyway.
--Bill Brenner"

Apparently, the idiot doesn't realize that they ARE protecting their home--with Anonymous.

LastOneStanding · Mar 22, 2011

dude it just kills me with joy to see how many assholes are asking for utter dick wreckage from the anon hornet here lately.
is that like the in thing now?

whosit · Mar 22, 2011

Has anyone asked to be wrecked here lately? Or did they (like myself) just comment?

lulzgasm · Mar 22, 2011

LastOneStanding said: ↑

dude it just kills me with joy to see how many assholes are asking for utter dick wreckage from the anon hornet here lately.
is that like the in thing now?

Welcome to the world of being the perceived "top dog." Might as well get used to the idea of everyone and their mothers making up any excuse to "take you out."

LastOneStanding · Mar 22, 2011

lulzgasm said: ↑

Welcome to the world of being the perceived "top dog." Might as well get used to the idea of everyone and their mothers making up any excuse to "take you out."

dude i know ima relative noob on the anonfront but when did we gain that illustrious tittle?
did something just go completely over my head here?

LastOneStanding · Mar 22, 2011

whosit said: ↑

Has anyone asked to be wrecked here lately? Or did they (like myself) just comment?

no i wasn't refering to you personally silly
there has jut been a resurgence of retards on the same anon hornet sting filled path as aaron barr and greggie hoglund.
i would look up all the threads about it but i haz a lazy right now.

whosit · Mar 23, 2011

K. Haven't been lurking for a while. Just getting caught up.

Anonymous · Mar 23, 2011

Ha HA hA.

Anonymous · Mar 23, 2011

with the "hornet's nest" analogy....
those guys should be aware that logs of their comments in various threads -by Barr and his posse could probably be found, and it could be probably be argued that they set out to generate discord and infighting in this forum, thus making them instigators with their own nefarious motivations.

it's all pretty much moot at this point.
i'm not impressed with their inaccurate gatherings and lack of understanding of this phenomenon. it is a very superficial outlook, and as it has been made clear, their own motivation was to manipulate Anon into something from which they could personally profit, and really back stab a lot of good guise.

LastOneStanding · Mar 23, 2011

Anonymous said: ↑

with the "hornet's nest" analogy....
those guys should be aware that logs of their comments in various threads -by Barr and his posse could probably be found, and it could be probably be argued that they set out to generate discord and infighting in this forum, thus making them instigators with their own nefarious motivations.

it's all pretty much moot at this point.
i'm not impressed with their inaccurate gatherings and lack of understanding of this phenomenon. it is a very superficial outlook, and as it has been made clear, their own motivation was to manipulate Anon into something from which they could personally profit, and really back stab a lot of good guise.

nah that manipulation honor was given to the WBC along with the epic FAIL trophy to go with it. i think this was just a play to use anonymous as a foot in the door for hbgary and habgary federal to secure clients.

Anonymous · Mar 23, 2011

channeling a scientologist:::::::

What are your crimes, HBG?

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Hoglund's Anonymous Conspiracy Theory

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