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 think your last paragraph nails it. He apparently called out a bunch of innocent people. Imagine the damage that could do?
Skilled technical hackers giving the attacks technical direction, or skilled social hackers who know how to get a bunch of anonymous teenagers to do their bidding?
The combination of those skills is the secret sauce.
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 think your last paragraph nails it. He apparently called out a bunch of innocent people. Imagine the damage that could do? And agreed, the coder was a saint among men!
Regardless of whether the ones he called out are innocent (though I suspect most are, since his methods are the work of a madman), he trawled through hundreds of profiles, twitter feeds, IRC conversations, and basically cyberstalked the hell out of every friend of every person he thought might be a "leader" of Anonymous; many of them underage, and the vast majority completely oblivious about Anonymous. He even created a fake persona, who was a kid just like his targets. This is the stuff pedophiles and con-men do to get closer to their victims. I'm not suggesting the guy is a pedophile (but "con-man" might be a good word to describe him); I'm just saying that I can't believe any adult (if not Barr himself, who I don't think is quite sane, then one of the many people at his company who had some idea of what he was doing) would look at all these activities and not think, "Whoah! This is crazy and probably illegal. We need to reel this guy in, or get him out of this company before he causes us real trouble."
A great read. It's amazing how Aaron Barr completely believed his hunches even when his programmer said that the data doesn't backup his analysis.
He is a business man trying to get paid big bucks from FBI for his hunches.
Apparently the S/MIME signatures match just fine ... it is possible they got ahold of their private keys as well to sign messages, but that would be more difficult than hacking the central servers as private keys are stored locally on the clients machine.
This is true, but doesn't mean there aren't coordinators, actually skilled hackers who embrace the directionlessness even as they give it direction. It isn't _just_ foot-soldiers.
There are no real leaders; they may break off into factions, like those that frequent a certain IRC room, but the group "Anonymous" is a non-entity by any meaningful definition. It's whoever happens to be on 4chan or other, mostly similar message boards, and out of those, whoever is enticed to join a chat room or download LOIC, and out of those, people that actually click the button to send a lot of requests to DDOS…
> The most accurate definition for Anonymous is "a subset of users of Xchan". That's not a very good definition, especially if you want to go around and pin DDOS and whatever else on individual people.
I mentally replace "Anonymous" with "protesters" whenever they're protesting anything. It makes it a lot more clear and it's more accurate. We already have amorphous groups of people who protest various things, and this is, as near as I can tell, the online equivalent.