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How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

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Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#71
On a related note, what he was trying to do reminded me of a Kaggle.com winner on social networks, deanonymizing social networks: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf . The latter, of course, is better than gut feel.

Also, his coder is fun. :D Taco!!!

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#72
I've resisted discussing this but I think it's late enough after the event to chime in.

First off, disclaimer: We sell HBGary's products in the UK, I know Greg and Penny personally, as well as Jussi (who runs rootkit.com but as far as I'm aware does not work for HBGary). I'm not claiming to speak for anyone or company, just for myself on a purely personal level.

After looking into this, what happened is that HBGary invested in 15% of HBGary Federal, a company set up to do work HBGary didn't want to do. Now presumably (from TFA) they were looking at selling this off.

I don't know Aaron, but it sounds to me like he's a bit of a character at least (I'll leave it to others to resort to namecalling) and completely misunderstood what Anonymous are and how they work - FWIW we investigated Anonymous' years ago for some clients who'd been DDOSed and concluded that the simple solution is (to paraphrase Greg's irc comment) not to poke the wasps nest.

Penny, Greg and HBGary in general are in a bit of a tough situation now because of Aaron's actions and appear to have no ability to impose anything on HBGary Federal. This should serve as a warning to others that if you're going to use the name elsewhere, you better have a way of enforcing unforseen issues that may arise.

The sad thing about all of this is that Penny and Greg are really great guys, and HBGary is a good company with some insanely great technology. I'm sure they'll pull through, but I imagine there will be collateral damage for them resulting from this for some time to come.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#73

Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did " and whoever is listening joins in?

Power law still applies. Most likely 90% of serious action is done by the same 0.1% contributors (same as it is on HN or reddit or anywhere else). It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a goo…

If we go with the fact that Anonymous is infact a true distributed environment, then the replacement mechanism will be very easy. I think Anonymous is a kind of humanized group-comm architecture sans a coordinator.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power law still applies. Most likely 90% of serious action is done by the same 0.1% contributors (same as it is on HN or reddit or anywhere else). It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a goo…

Implying that the 0.1% have never been caught?

Only that it's hard to know, one way or another.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power law still applies. Most likely 90% of serious action is done by the same 0.1% contributors (same as it is on HN or reddit or anywhere else). It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a goo…

If we go with the fact that Anonymous is infact a true distributed environment, then the replacement mechanism will be very easy. I think Anonymous is a kind of humanized group-comm architecture sans a coordinator.

You're overestimating the uniqueness of Anon. Most communities nowadays don't have coordinators. And Anon doesn't have limitless communication channels, only about a dozen. For a site/software to be a good choice, it has to be already in the "hivemind". Ask 10 Anon tot tell them 10 places where they hang, and the most common choices are the (only) ones that are viable.

There is a unique feature though - the anonymity. This could really make a difference if things get serious.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#76

I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuitio…

"Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have 'other ways of knowing' or extremely heightened intuition), and a belief that once they tell the whole story of the truths that have been revealed to them the world will take notice and be amazed."

Are you describing a schizophrenic or a newbie entrepreneur? ;)

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#77

I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuitio…

I'm not sure that schizophrenia is any better an explanation than straightforward arrogance. Assuming that the leaks of his work are reasonably accurate I'd be concerned if the government actually started using his research to arrest people though. I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the…

[deleted]

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#78

This guy is clearly a dangerous moron. This kinda makes me feel better for being so cold about this whole affair in the other thread. The terrifying thing is that there are still people in government who believe sentences like "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media. I mean, who claims one hundred percent success…

The same people who believe that DRM can effectively prevent copying, if the people selling it say that it can. Which is to say, the ones who think of technology as wizardry, and evaluate wizards by looking for social proof. (They can't really evaluate what the guy's selling, but they sure can tell if he's the kind of person that would get respect at a cocktail party.)

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#79

I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuitio…

> The coder in this story is an hero

Oh man, I'm not sure if this is funnier if you meant it, or not...

> in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison.

Yup. I'm interested to see what happens in the weeks ahead. I really doubt that anything bad (other than getting his SSN posted to Twitter...) will actually happen to him, though.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#80
post #66

I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuitio…

HBGary's proposed plan of attack against Wikileaks http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-in...

Here's the actual document, rather than a summary: http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf
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