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Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

blogs.forbes.com

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Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#2
Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans.

And people call me paranoid. :)

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#3
post #2

Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans. And people call me paranoid. :)

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ...

If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#4
post #2

Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans. And people call me paranoid. :)

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ... If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

Not to mention that she gave a lot of personal history surrounding her parents and family history. That might not uniquely identify her, but it does narrow the search considerably. My guess: if he/she is even a single real person, much of this is fabricated.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ... If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

Not to mention that she gave a lot of personal history surrounding her parents and family history. That might not uniquely identify her, but it does narrow the search considerably. My guess: if he/she is even a single real person, much of this is fabricated.

I think it reeks of fabrication. It's probably some geek living out their alter ego or something.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#6
post #2

Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans. And people call me paranoid. :)

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ... If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

That is what I was thinking. Ya know, you probably don't want to disclose your operational security procedures because well, they aren't common and not being common, their trackable.

And then I was thinking about how the police sometimes "leak" that the suspect in some crime is weak, pathetic, individual which nobody really cares about, in hopes that they will offend the real suspect who will then self identify in defense of their honor. If you thought the Anonymous ring leader on the HBGary hack was some teenage guy then the best way to provoke a response would be to either call him gay or a girl it seems.

I wonder how well the E-book Ars put out is selling. And more importantly, if its really successful I wonder if these people who did this are comfortable with someone getting rich off their exploits?

You see? The twisted depths to which you go if you start down these paths. Sheesh.

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#7
Since the girl is a person and not a thing, it should be "... girl who hacked hbgary". r11t copied the mistake from Forbes-- How do national magazines make grammatical errors like this? Don't these people have editors who at least earned a passing grade in middle school English?

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#8
This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity.

This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps).

On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very well constructed one, which the imposter empathises with.

But, on the whole, the setup "feels" wrong (and I tend to trust my instincts in such matters).

Re: Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

#10
post #2

Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans. And people call me paranoid. :)

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ... If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

I figure that such setups could employ a number of cron scripts to spread out actions and/or generate noise. E.g. every minutes delete a random email out of a set of everything older than 24 hours. Adjust the constants to match the volume of information.
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