Bank of America Hires Firm To Attack Anonymous/Wikileaks

Three data intelligence firms concocted a plan to attack WikiLeaks on behalf of Bank of America, according to a published report.

The three firms, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, planned to “disrupt” Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald’s support of WikiLeaks, create a disinformation campaign to discredit the secrets outlet, sow discord among WikiLeaks volunteers, and use cyber attacks to target the website’s infrastructure.
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It seems that things have not gone so well for Aaron Barr, a man who worked for HBGary and was tasked with attempting to infiltrate anonymous. After Barr boasted about his hacking prowess and made fun of anonymous, anonymous released the statement “We are kind of pissed at him right now” . At this point HBGary felt the full brunt of anonymous. Their website was replaced with the image below which included a link to over 40,000 private company emails which had been put up on Pirate Bay.

It is rumored that all of Aaron Barrs electronic devices had been completely compromised including his IPad and IPhone which had been erased remotely. At one point the company head (Penny Leavy) was called to try and control the situation which resulted in this weird collision between the corporate world and the inner workings of anonymous. Here is the entire chat log of her basically begging anonymous to stop.

Days later HBGary had been completely taken to their knees and their home offices had all of the information completely compromised. Which, for a security company, could have devastating effects, including possibly sending the company into bankruptcy. One anonymous member stated “What amazes me is, for a security company – you had such a basic SQL vulnerability on your website,”

Aaron Barr, beginning to become unhinged started going to his coder and asked him to modify the code within a popular program used by anons to take down websites. It’s called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and it was originally developed by a private internet security company to test websites. Basically Barr wanted his coder to rewrite a portion of the code which would link to a website Barr had created on blogger.com . His coder was skeptical and even confrontational telling Barr that he wouldn’t touch a line of code that came from anonymous, and went on to call him a “military industrialist capitalist fuck” and even asked him “how do you sleep at night?”.

Barrs relation HBGary continued to fall apart as Penny (lol the woman in the chat and president of the company) was also trying to sell the company at the time. Their stock prices fell by millions of dollars within days as they couldn’t even keep their company website online. Penny Leavy later told the Financial Times “I wish it had been handled differently”

Perhaps the next company which attempts to take on anonymous should remember one thing. The internet, is serious business. :)