Unmasked - Ars Technica [33]
Subject: Security Problem
loooooooooooooooooool
owned by anonymous. niiiice.
hope your strategy wont work and ppl of this planet will become free without beeing surpressed or monitored.
shame on you for your “business” - it is ppl like you who try to stop human revelation all in the name of allmighty america.
nice to see you failing hard and getting exposed yourself. how does it feel, suckers ?
i am looking forward to see your next fail.
greets
one of your monitored sheep that actually dont like to be monitored.
ps: please do us (the human race that is not trying to be nazis like you) a favor and get aids and die slow and painfull,
thanks in advance.
The real impact of the attacks on Anonymous may not be felt for months, or even years. HBGary says it is working with the authorities on the case, and one presumes that the FBI is interested in busting those responsible. The FBI has previously arrested those associated with mere denial of service attacks, and it recently executed 40 search warrants in connection with Anonymous’ Operation Payback.
In a press release regarding the search warrants, the FBI reminded Anonymous that “facilitating or conducting a DDoS [Distributed denial of service] attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability.”
Butterworth, who touted his own (lengthy) list of advanced security credentials during our call, told us that based on his investigation so far, the Anonymous “operational security was not that good… they’re pretty dirty.”
If he’s right, the Anonymous attack, so far free of consequences, might end with some serious ones indeed.
Palantir
Those consequences have already been felt at the link analysis firm Palantir, based in Silicon Valley. The company was part of “Team Themis,” a group comprised of Palantir, Berico, and HBGary Federal, which got involved with the DC law firm Hunton & Williams. Hunton & Williams was looking for ways to help the US Chamber of Commerce, and later a major US bank, deal with troublesome opponents (pro-union websites and WikiLeaks, respectively.)
As a member of Team Themis, Palantir became part of Aaron Barr’s plans to go after WikiLeaks, put pressure on commentators like Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, and set up a surveillance cell for the Chamber of Commerce. No one in the e-mails that we saw objected to any of the proposed ideas.
When news of the proposals came out, Palantir said it was horrified. Dr. Alex Karp, the company’s CEO, issued a statement: “We make data integration software that is as useful for fighting food borne illness as it is to fighting fraud and terrorism. Palantir does not make software that has the capability to carry out the offensive tactics proposed by HBGary. Palantir never has and never will condone the sort of activities recommended by HBGary. As we have previously stated, Palantir has severed all ties with HBGary going forward.”
As we noted in our initial report on the situation, several of the key ideas had come from Aaron Barr—but they were quickly adopted by other team members, including Palantir. I asked the company for more information on why Barr’s ideas had shown up in Palantir-branded material. The company’s general counsel, Matt Long, supplied the following answer:
We did make a mistake—one of a fast growing company with lots of decentralized decision making authority. Initial results of our ongoing internal diagnostic show that a junior engineer allowed offensive material authored by HBGary to end up on a slide deck with Palantir’s logo. The stolen emails conclusively show that Aaron Barr from HBGary authored the content which was collated well past midnight for an early morning presentation the next day. This doesn’t excuse the incident, but hopefully it brings much needed context to a context-less email dump.
That junior engineer, a 26-year-old, has been put on leave while