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Reading the story, time and time again his programmer warned him about anonymous, and said he shouldn't be messing with them. Then what do you know, he gets attacked by anonymous. Do you think maybe his programmer is in anonymous? :)
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 i…
Insane would be to trust security-related products or advice from a company that can't even secure its own mailserver.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 thi…
I would guess that such groups are being manipulated by exceptionally smart people for specific ends, some significant fraction of the time.
I think that's a tempting theory to have. Explains a lot and is easy to understand, but I think it gives individuals too much credit.
I would guess exceptionally smart people drift in and out at random and attempt to use the group for specific ends. I think their success rate is slim and random.
By "random" I actually mean the group may go along if it thinks it would be "lulz". Notice I said "may", it also may not - lots of random noise in the hive mind.
What this means is that trying to control or predict the actions of the group is a fool's game. At best you may be able to influence them occasionally in some small way, its pure chaos theory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, a human powered botnet that follows commands at random based on how much fun they are?
If it's based on how fun they are, then it's not random (unless fun is randomly distributed).
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 i…
HBGary is a good company with some insanely great technology Insane would be to trust security-related products or advice from a company that can't even secure its own mailserver.
The rootkit.com mail server has nothing to do with HBGary AFAIK.
To put it in perspective, HBGary's (not HBGary Federal) technology is a thing called Digital DNA that cuts down the amount of time it takes to analyse memory fragments. That's their focus.
I could understand your reference if they were a company that wrote mail server software and were compromised through their mail server, but your point is a bit of an apple to oranges comparison.
The thing is, people get owned all the time. Even security companies. Heck, we get targeted attacks on us fairly routinely, and when something comes in we have (I think, and unlike most we have actually been able to test it's effectiveness) reasonably good methods for detecting bad stuff coming in and going out, but I'd never say that one day our emails won't end up spread across the Internet, and I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest that someone that has had systems compromised didn't do a proper job just because they were compromised.
The attacker only needs one way in. The defender has to protect against everything. That's not a level playing field.
Did this drive anyone else bonkers? I think "accept" or "hightened" alone wouldn't have bugged me. But for some reason the juxtaposition of the two in this sentence made me nerdrage.
Based on my own minimal experience, the majority of these IRC channels are just a small group of "Anonymous" doing whatever they want, different channels will get publicised at different times through different means, "Anonymous" doesn't exist in any way beyond being a label people use, I guess it could be compared to "emo" or "jock" in high school; they have no "leadership" but people join these groups and label the…
Q is probably a reference to Star Trek character's Q: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Q
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.
Sadly, were he rewarded with a continuing money stream, he would likely justify the innocent names as "collateral damage" as the money would have been a mark of success. Aaron Barr fancies himself a modern-day witch-hunter, and it's good he was hoisted on his own petard.