To the left, Aaron Barr: ceo of US Government-contracted digital security firm, HBGary Federal – the man who tried to take down the ‘headless’ hacker collective Anonymous, and had his ass, his company and his reputation handed to him last week.
Convinced that Anonymous was a tiny group, Barr set out to identify the names and addresses of its leading hackers by cross-referencing Twitter and Facebook data. At one point, he bragged to a colleague:
“They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!” he wrote. “As 1337 [possessed of formidable hacking skills] as these guys are suppsed to be they don’t get it. I have pwned them! :)”
Very foolish words. Last week, when Barr went public with his claim to have identified three Anonymous hackers, Anonymous struck back.
Inside 24 hours, the HBGary Security network was DDOS’d and replaced with this message. 40,000 company emails stuffed with nondisclosure agreements, confidential documents, salary numbers, and other sensitive data were extracted from the corporate server and posted up on the Pirate Bay. 1TB of backup data was reportedly deleted and one hacker even claimed to have remotely wiped Barr’s iPad.
Barr’s Twitter site ended up like this.
So far, the attacks have cost Barr a fair slice of his reputation as a digital security expert and HBGary millions of dollars. But here’s the capper.
According to Anonymous, the entire operation was carried out by a team of five, one of whom is allegedly a 16-year old girl.
Poor Aaron. As Ichabod Crane could have told him, it’s never a good idea to f**k with the headless.
