Thread: What Will it Take to Defeat Hackers?

"Hackers gained "full functional control" of key Nasa computers in 2011, the agency's inspector general has told US lawmakers." BBC News - Hackers had 'full functional control' of Nasa computers Hmm... do they have plugs?

Not really hard core Marxist terrorists...

LulzSec Hacking Suspects Are Arrested
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: March 6, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/te...sted.html?_r=1
For months, The Real Sabu, as he called himself on Twitter, boasted, cursed and egged on his followers to take part in high-profile computer attacks against private companies and government agencies worldwide.
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“Don’t give in to these people,” he wrote on Monday, ridiculing the “cowards” in the federal government. “Fight back. Stay strong.”

It turns out that Sabu had become an informant for federal law enforcement authorities. On Tuesday, in what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the government crackdown on a loose, large confederation of politically inspired “hacktivists,” he was unmasked and revealed to have helped authorities nab several fellow hackers in Europe and the United States.

Four men in Britain and Ireland were charged Tuesday with a slew of computer crimes; a fifth man was arrested Monday in Chicago.

Court papers identified Sabu as Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, of New York. He pleaded guilty last August to a dozen counts of conspiracy to attack computers. He had operated since then as usual — as The Real Sabu, instigating attacks and quoting revolutionaries online.

The prosecutions are part of a wave of coordinated efforts by law enforcement officials worldwide to rein in a leaderless, multinational movement called Anonymous, which attracted attention for its protests against the Church of Scientology and in support of the whistleblower site WikiLeaks. It has spawned spinoffs with different names and insignias, among them LulzSec, which claimed to target computer security companies for laughs, or lulz, and of which Sabu was a prominent, outspoken member.

Just last week, Interpol announced the arrests of 25 suspected Anonymous members in Europe. Sabu reacted to that news on Twitter by urging others to attack Interpol’s Web site.

Mr. Monsegur’s base of operations seems to have been his late grandmother’s sixth-floor apartment in a public housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was apparently self-trained, and he appears to have been equally skilled at hacking and deceiving his fellow hackers. His demise, if nothing else, will sow even more distrust and dissension in the ranks of Anonymous.

“It is going to be very difficult for Anonymous to recover from such a breach of trust,” said Mikko Hyponnen, a security researcher at F-Secure Labs in Helsinki. “You can see the Anonymous people now looking left and right and realizing, if they couldn’t trust Sabu, who can they trust?”

Whether this will temper the larger hacktivist cause remains to be seen. Anonymous is a decentralized movement that is, broadly speaking, against state institutions and the companies that work with them, and they have embraced an ever-shifting variety of causes, from animal rights to democracy in the Middle East.

Their ranks are steadily replenished with people of varying skills. Their targets have included Fox News, Sony, the government contractor HBGary and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their favored tactics are either to launch brute-force attacks designed to slow down or shut down sites, or to break into computer systems and expose embarrassing communications.

Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies the Anonymous movement and teaches at McGill University, said she expected the latest prosecutions would likely have “a chilling effect” on their hacking tactics, but not necessarily on their other forms of activism.

“These are moments of massive reflection — who are we, what do we want to be?” she said of Anonymous.

The four charged in the indictment were identified as Ryan Ackroyd, known as Kayla, and Jake Davis, or Topiary, both of Britain; and Darren Martyn, known as Pwnsauce, and Donncha O’Cearrbhail, known as Palladium, both of Ireland. Jeremy Hammond, or Anarchaos, of Chicago, was arrested in Chicago; he belongs to an Anonymous node known as AntiSec.

Rob Rachwald, director of security at Imperva, a security firm, said the arrests were not unexpected. “They left a lot of electronic footprints and were not exactly careful about the information they were disclosing about themselves,” he said.

In June, LulzSec members admitted in a public chat room that they had revealed too many clues to their identities. “Sabu and I got a bit carried away and gave LulzSec away a bit,” read one post from Topiary.

Barrett Brown, who has spoken on behalf of Anonymous in past attacks, including the attack on Stratfor in December, said that his home in Dallas had been raided and that the F.B.I. had sent three agents to his mother’s house, where he stayed Monday night.

“I received an advance warning of the raid and put all my laptops in very specific places where they couldn’t be found,” Mr. Brown said. He said the agents left without making an arrest.

Mr. Brown said the arrests elsewhere would not slow down the Anonymous movement. “There are lots and lots of people here that continue to work. The F.B.I. did not really cut the head off of anything. Anonymous will go forward as usual. So will I. We hired an army of lawyers last January. We are prepared for a big slug-out.”

Reporting was contributed by Nicole Perlroth in San Francisco, Steven Yaccino in Chicago, and Alex Vadukul and Tim Stelloh in New York .

Throw away the key

LulzSec's Sabu Was Identity Thief, Not Robin Hood
Federal indictment accuses Sabu of crossing a clear line between political expression and criminal activity.

By Mathew J. Schwartz InformationWeek
March 07, 2012 12:47 PM
LulzSec's Sabu Was Identity Thief, Not Robin Hood - Security - Attacks/breaches - Informationweek
The hacktivist group LulzSec made a name for itself by cracking databases and servers sporting poor security, then publicizing what they'd been able to do and find. Groups as diverse as the Atlanta InfraGard chapter, Sony Pictures Entertainment, the U.S. Senate, and PBS saw their websites hacked and defaced, and sensitive information leaked.

The group portrayed itself as being a group devoted to "lulz," which is Internet slang that can be interpreted as "laughs, humor, or amusement." That definition comes from a 12-count federal indictment unsealed in federal court Tuesday against four men authorities said comprised part of the core of LulzSec: Ryan Ackroyd (aka kayla, lol, lolspoon), Jake Davis (aka topiary, atopiary), Darren Martyn (aka pwnsauce, raepsauce, networkkitten), and Donncha O'Cearrbhail (aka Palladium).

But a related 12-count indictment, also unsealed Tuesday, singled out 28-year-old Hector Xavier Monsegur (aka Sabu, Xavier DeLeon, Leon) as the LulzSec leader, in addition to being an ongoing participant in the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous. He reportedly pled guilty to all the charges leveled against him, which collectively carry a maximum prison sentence of 124 years and six months.

A post from Sabu's Twitter account Monday struck a seeming note of defiance: "The federal government is run by a bunch of [obscenity removed] cowards. Don't give in to these people. Fight back. Stay strong."

[ Learn about the newest trends and practices to help keep your company's data secure. Read 10 Lessons From RSA Security Conference. ]

The 27-page indictment against Monsegur details a striking number of exploits, some overtly political, some riffing on pop culture, and others seemingly just random. Notably, the indictment accused Monsegur of having participated in Operation Payback, which involved launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in retaliation for MasterCard, PayPal, Visa, and other payment providers cutting off funds to WikiLeaks. It also accuses him of hacking attacks against Tunisian, Zimbabwean, Algerian, and Yemini government servers. In cooperation with hacking group "Internet Feds"--of which Ackroyd, Davis, Martyn, and O'Cearrbhail were allegedly core members--Monsegur was also accused of hacking into HBGary and releasing thousands of emails.

Then there's the LulzSec band, which hacked into numerous sites and became famous for bragging about it. "Although the members of LulzSec and their co-conspirators claimed to have engaged in these attacks for humorous purposes ... LulzSec's criminal acts included, among other things, the theft of confidential information, including sensitive personal information for thousands of individuals, from their victims' computer systems; the public disclosure of that confidential information on the Internet; the defacement of Internet websites; and overwhelming victims' computers with bogus requests for information"--meaning DDoS attacks--according to the indictment.

If LulzSec built its reputation on merry pranks--such as releasing contact details for 73,000 X-Factor contestants--the indictment also accused Monsegur of outright fraud and other criminal activity.

For starters, Monsegur was accused of hacking into an automotive parts site and shipping himself four engines, worth a total of $3,450. Authorities also accused Monsegur of using stolen credit card numbers to pay off at least $1,000 in debts and sharing people's bank account, routing number, and personal information with others, meaning he engaged in identity theft.

"Those who suggest Sabu's actions were just hacktivism or 'for the lulz' need to recognize that Sabu wasn't a Robin Hood who nobly gave voice to a cause, but a thief who admitted to lining his own pockets," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos Canada, in a blog post.

Would the dollar values attached to those crimes, had they been conducted using a stolen credit card, have even merited an investigation by local police? Regardless, when you add in illegally accessing and defacing government websites and numerous hacks of private businesses' sites, you can expect the FBI to start investigating.

On a related note, after a 50-day hacking spree, LulzSec--without warning--bid adieu in June 2011. At the time, the group's unexpected retirement appeared to mark yet another random move from the chaos-craving band.

Thanks to the federal indictments unsealed Tuesday, however, it's now clear that Monsegur had been busted that month, after which he began cooperating with the FBI. The cooperation even went so far as using FBI-provided servers to unpack stolen information, including emails stolen from Stratfor, which were then shared with WikiLeaks.

Accordingly to the indictment, he also helped the bureau to amass evidence against other LulzSec and Anonymous participants. For example, he lured O'Cearrbhail, on an anonymous chat, into revealing which VPN service he used to obscure his identity. Investigators were then able to correlate login times with O'Cearrbhail's IP address, which they used to help positively identify the Irish citizen, who’s accused of leaking a transatlantic law enforcement conference call discussing ongoing investigations into LulzSec and Anonymous.