The Man Who Angered Anonymous And Lived To Regret It

the notorious hacking group anonymous anonymous is one of the biggest online vigilante groups members hacked into companies and government greeting citizens of the world this is a message from anonymous sitting on his couch in the suburbs this man was suddenly gripped by the unusual situation he found himself in his phone hadn't made any noises for a while this never happened aaron barr was one of those people who lived inside his phone even on the day of the biggest sporting event in the united states he took out his phone and examined it no new notifications much like when you're trying to look engrossed in your phone in a busy waiting room he went to the email app and refreshed the page to see if it just wasn't showing up that wasn't the case instead he was greeted with the words cannot get mail maybe the login session has expired he thought trying anything he could to distract himself from what he knew to be the truth he went to the login page and carefully typed his password kebafo 33 it didn't work bar had one of those feelings you get that can't really be put into words besides the vulgarity of your stomach dropping out of your [ __ ] the feeling that lets you know something extremely bad just happened and you're powerless to do anything about it you see earlier that day aaron barr had been chatting to a hacker named topiari who was part of the group known simply as anonymous this exchange was significant but he thought he was in the clear only allowing himself to be gripped by the panic for a moment he rushed upstairs to his home computer as quickly as he could perhaps he thought he could stem the bleeding or recover accounts before it was too late he was wrong he couldn't believe how wrong he was in fact accounts that had nothing to do with anything were already compromised along with ones that could end his whole career facebook twitter yahoo at this stage perhaps in a way to maintain some sanity or form of control even tried to log into his world of warcraft account that also didn't work as anxiety and panic once again took control the flashing lights caught his attention it was the router they were now using a distributed denial of service attack to take down his home network i'm [ __ ] he thought and he was right after two semesters of college and the realization that school wasn't in his blood barr decided that the us navy would be more his speed barr is a smart guy and became a citizen officer signals intelligence for sure specializing in analytics with deployments across the planet he racked up years of experience in his specialization four years in japan three years in spain time in the ukraine portugal italy and many more european countries quite the career he spent a good portion of his time on board warships but even dipped his toes into ground missions being shot at in kosovo 12 years of this was enough to sauris attitude towards war and he retired to a quiet life as a defense contractor for a company called northrop grumman he started a family and soon a new company with a security consultant by the name of greg hoagland hoagland already running his own business called hp gary inc proposed the creation of a sister company called hb gary federal that would specialize in selling services to the united states government under the control of bar a golden opportunity to apply bars extensive skills sharpen through years in the navy and break through the glass ceiling of being an employee instead being the boss giving him more time to spend with a wife and kids this optimism didn't last for long despite sleepless nights trying to think of ways to secure contracts for hp carey federal the business wasn't bringing in any money he was desperate by this point over a year since he took the plunge and he could hardly pay himself and the two employees he had let alone continue to expand the business the only reason he hadn't been forced to close the company was a single contract he was providing quote social media training for executives which sounds like a guide on how to use facebook or stay safe on twitter but was in fact how to use social networking sites to gather information and spy on people despite the circumstances being grim bar was not a man to give up easily in october 2010 he began conversations with a law firm by the name of hunter and williams they needed help quote dealing with their opponents an example being a recent wikileaks link that heavily suggested they were withholding a trove of confidential data from one of their clients a little company known as the bank of america this was the perfect opportunity for barr to jump into action with a powerpoint presentation all about how he could start a disinformation campaign against wikileaks any journalists that supported them or discussed the leaks as well as perform cyber attacks on the website itself applying the tools of his trade further he showed the law firm how they could gather information on the personal lives of the staff by friending them on facebook despite this effort january 2011 rolled around and they were still without any contracts it was time to do something crazy and he had the perfect venue for it a conference by the name of b-sides which was specifically for security professionals and being hosted in san francisco bar knew that he needed a topic that would showcase his skills while being intriguing enough to ignite the interest of his peers it just so happened around this time the hacker group known as anonymous were a mainstay of mainstream media headlines as wikileaks was starting to become impossible to ignore due to what they were publishing major corporate entities were making moves to try and choke the website out of existence under pressure from the us government paypal froze the donation accounts of wikileaks visa mastercard and western union stopped accepting payments for the website and according to founder julian assange cost them 95 of their revenue this sparked a sort of internet war with multiple groups of hackers targeting the websites and services of companies like mastercard and visa as retaliation for what they were doing to wikileaks a fascinating story in and of itself with a rabbit hole that goes deep enough for a separate video altogether people across the globe were watching this situation intrigued by the mysterious group known as anonymous and bar was no exception he recognized this as an opportunity the golden opportunity while the rest had been made in connection to these cyber attacks convictions were almost unheard of and leadership was still out there that is if there even was leadership no one even knew who they were looking for yet or what the organizational structure was barr however thought he could find them he thought he could do a better job than the fbi using the skills taught to him in the navy and in the process propel his company to the front of all cues for the lucrative defense contracts he was looking for he understood the risks in chasing down a group of unknown size and power or at least he thought he did i mean what's the worst they can do to him right most likely just take down his website deface it with their usual shock value messaging including racism and many words that would get this video deleted from the internet as of 2022 and so he began his investigation applying his tradecraft to try and infiltrate anonymous he started out lurking in online chat rooms where supporters of the group would congregate he went by the name of anancog which later became cog anon he pretended to be a new anon ready to do whatever he could to assist the cause all the while meticulously keeping track of the other users comings and goings there were hundreds of users active in the chat each day though he was paying the closest attention to the people who were most active he used fake facebook accounts to friend anyone who openly supported anonymous of which there were many and tried to time when frequent users would leave the chat with any of those accounts immediately becoming active on facebook the assumption being a user would leave chat then log on facebook and he could try to match real-life identities to their chatroom counterparts not the most sophisticated method and definitely full of holes by the end of 2011 however he'd made a 20-page document of names descriptions and contact information for suspected supporters and even some leaders of the group anonymous on january 22nd 2011 he sent out an email to business partner hoagland as well as co-president penny levy and his own second in command at hb gary federal ted vera informing them of his impending talk at b-sides along with the goal the main benefit of this would be the press attention in what he thought was a 300 iq move he also leaked the information of the impending talk to a few people within anonymous telling them that a so-called cyber security expert would be giving a talk about anonymous at the conference he even told them the name of this expert aaron barr his own name this was both incredibly smart and incredibly stupid at the same time this was the hail mary play he wanted all eyeballs on him and he was poking a very dangerous bee's nest under the assumption he was smart enough to avoid getting stung and get away with all the honey along with this he reached out to journalists prior to the event to drum up even more interest seizing on the fact that people were very curious about the name anonymous and directing them to his impending tour one such journalist was joseph men a reporter from san francisco area who worked for the financial times bar discussed the basic outline of the more extensive talk with joseph about the hundreds of participants in these cyber attacks the structure of the organization with 10 names sitting at the very top he suggested that anonymous was much more organized than people thought and had a typical hierarchy with decisions coming down from this leadership the story was printed on friday february 4th with the headline cyber activists warned of arrest with quotes from bar within this was fantastic news and within 24 hours the fbi was reaching out to bar asking him if he would share his information with them the plan had worked it was flawless the meeting was set monday the day after the super bowl barr would go to meet with the fbi and turn in all he knew about anonymous but the fbi wasn't the only organization that had taken an interest in bar's story a new chat room had been set up and invites was sent out by a user known as tflo sabu topyari kayla and tiflo started to talk to each other and the topic was aaron barr they discussed the article printed in the financial times how barr had claimed to know the hierarchy of anonymous which was conceptually wrong as there was no hierarchy meaning most of his other research was likely also wrong but could still be dangerous to them even if the idea was wrong the names could be right the group very quickly got to work collecting information on bar and his business hb gary federal including the website now to highlight some irony here hb gary federal existed almost entirely to assist other companies in their cyber security but their own website ran on a third-party publishing system that left it open to an sql injection essentially databases store information unstructured query language or sql for sure was a popular way to retrieve and manipulate information within set databases an sql injection works by injecting commands into the server to retrieve information that should be hidden from the user using this method sabo and kayla managed to get usernames and passwords for all employees of hp gary including hoagland and their target bar the passwords were luckily encrypted using a standard technique called md5 and if these passwords were well made long and complex it would be almost impossible to crack and this wasn't the area of expertise for this particular group they instead took the three hashes representing passwords for aaron barr ted vera and another executive named phil wallish and uploaded them to a web forum called killer.com which specialized in cracking passwords exactly like this within a couple of hours all three hashes were cracked one of them which looked like this and there it was at the end of a long string of numbers and letters was aaron barr's password kbfo33 they tried to access hb gary federal email account hosted on google apps and it worked within 24 hours of learning about aaron barr's existence this group of four anonymous hackers were inside his company email watching him exchange messages with colleagues about how well the article had done and how happy he was about the situation not content with this level of access they took to the internet to try his username email and passwords on other websites it's funny really that a security expert who spent years working for the navy and now sold his expertise to corporations and potentially even the government had failed the first rule of operational security that you would tell your grandmother never use the same password across multiple accounts the password keyboard33 worked not just on his business emails but his twitter his yahoo flickr facebook and world of warcraft accounts at this point the group could do pretty much anything they wanted at any time instead they decided to be patient they would use this weekend to spy on bar and download every shred of information they could from all of his accounts in this investigation into the investigator they discovered his plans to meet the fbi in 60 hours on monday this information sent the chat room into a mild panic that is until they found his presentation pdf which didn't list the names of anyone within this 4-man group they however saw his method of correlating anonymous hackers to facebook accounts and decided he had no idea what he was doing while some of the group went through all of this tflo was compiling all of bars emails into a torrent which he planned to release on the popular torrent website the pirate bay at the very same time totally oblivious to what was going on with about 30 hours until the super bowl kicked off barr was running security checks on his website hbgaryfederal.com which was seeing more traffic than usual though none of which was organic barra told anonymous about his story and investigation he'd expected they would perform distribute denial of service attacks on the website in retaliation and if i had to guess i'd say he was pretty smug about the fact that this was the sum of their wrath there was only a mild inconvenience he did still try to nip this in the bud and logged into one of his many fake facebook profiles called julian goodspeak and spoke to one of his anonymous contacts called commander x who he believed was a senior member of anonymous hierarchy bar thought he had the name of this individual which he'd noted down in the investigation pdf as benjamin spock de vries this as with most if not all of the investigation was completely wrong he asked commander x if he could perhaps do something about the ddos but unfortunately he had no idea it was even happening not my doing he replied this in context should have let barr know that his assumption about anonymous having a traditional hierarchy was incorrect and the organization instead was many smaller groups working under the umbrella of the same name commander x also in this conversation let barr know that he'd taken a look at the hb guy federal website and they looked vulnerable to attack quote i hope you're being paid well he said despite receiving this warning bar did absolutely nothing with that information it was now sunday game day 11 hours until kickoff t-flow had finished collecting all of the emails from not only bars account but also vera and wallish as well the torrent was ready to go the group knew it was too late for bar to do anything and so decided it was time to toy with him a little bit during their time in his emails they knew about his super secret username in the anon chats and topiary made contact hello karganon replied hi the group were gathered around in a private chat coaching him on what to say tell him you're recruiting for a new mission be careful he may get suspicious quickly they said we're recruiting for a new operation in the washington area interested potentially depends on what it is bar replied topiary was pasting responses into the private chat as they came look at that f gamer word trying to psyops me out of info he said to the others i take it from your host that you are near where our target is he said to bar is it physical or virtual ah yeah i am close to applied bar virtual everything is playstation at this point tflo made another chat room within the anonymous chat network called ophb gary standing for operation hb gary and started to invite people to join another hacker by the name av unit joined and asked guys is this really happening because this [ __ ] is awesome meanwhile in the private conversation between top prairie and bar the group were twisting the screws our target is a security company panic immediately hit bar washington area where he lived security company this was about hb gary this was about him this was about his company he hastily wrote out an email and sent it to other hp gary managers to warn them quote now we are being directly threatened i will bring this up with the fbi when i meet them tomorrow the email read little did he know this group who was speaking to him right now was watching the email being sent okay well just let me know not sure how i can still help though barr replied to topiary after he sent this email to the managers that depends what skills do you have we need help gathering info on liguit.com security company replied topiary relief washed over bar he now thought he was safe liggett was in the same line of work in the same area he wasn't the target hb gary was safe ah okay let me check them out it's been a while since i've looked at them anything specific bar said to topiary but he didn't reply i didn't realize they were local to dc man i'm racking my brain and i can't remember why they were so popular a while ago i remember there being a lot of aggression towards them still no reply you still there at this point oprah was busy planning with the team he replied about 45 minutes later sorry about that stay tuned okay barr replied the relief bar felt was short-lived shortly after this exchange is when bar checked his phone and discovered things had gone badly it can't be overstated just how badly for any average person being hacked that's a nightmare the idea of strangers going through your personal correspondence or having access to intimate information regarding your life it's awful for barr however he was a cyber security expert his job was based on the perception he knew how to prevent this from happening and could charge you large sums of money to make sure you remain safe to make sure your company remains safe what does it say about your business when the leader fails so utterly in exactly what he's selling his pride or ego wouldn't help him though the next step was to contact his partners greg and penny to tell them what was happening then to contact his i.t admins who recommended contacting google to try and regain control of the website none of this however would recover the emails and that was the big problem at this point topiary and the rest of the group began their plan for real as this was just phase one first they logged into bars twitter and started post the way anonymous typically would okay my fellow anonymous f gamer word we're working on bringing you the finest laws as we speak stay tuned another tweet reads sup [ __ ] i'm ceo of a shitty company and i'm a giant media whoring c word check out my n-word greg's site rootkit.com followed by tweets containing all of bars personal information i'm talking his social security number his phone number his address literally everything now for context rootkit.com was hoglund's website dedicated to programming tools that could invisibly gain access to a computer system you see after initial access was gained to bar's server and while the rest of the group were compiling bars information and trolling him over the weekend sabu and kayla had been attempting to gain administrator access on the rootkit.com server in part they were able to accomplish this due to barr having been an administrator of the company email system which let his account reset the passwords of other inboxes including hoaglands while inside of hoglund's email accounts they sent emails to one of hbgary's admins a finnish security specialist attempting to ironically gain root access to rootkit.com i'm in europe i need to ssh into the server said sabu pretending to be hobland ssh stands for secure shell a way of logging into a server from a remote location are you on a public computer replied the admin no i don't have the public ip with me at the moment because i'm ready for a small meeting and i'm in a rush if anything just reset my password to changeme123 and give me public ip and i'll ssh and reset my password said sabo ok your password is change me one two three smiley face in europe but not in finland question mark replied the admin if i can squeeze out the time maybe we can catch up i'll be in germany for a little bit thanks finished sabu though the password didn't work he continued to email him pretending to be hoagland and somehow not remembering his username asking if it was greg but being reminded it was hoagland by said admin social engineering success though looking at this from an outsider perspective it seems incredibly obvious that this situation was one big red flag i mean how do you not remember your own username being your actual name it might not though they were in at every level as soon as they had this access they deleted everyone else's usernames and passwords changed the page to a simple html reading greg hoagland equals owned after that they did the same to hp gary federal.com removing the home page and replacing it with the anonymous logo though in place of the head was a question mark and at the bottom there was a link that said quote download hb gary emails directing anyone who clicked to the torrent t-flow had created in addition there was a message written by toprio that read as follows this domain has been seized by anonymous under section 14 of the rules of the internet greetings hb gary a computer security company your recent claims of infiltrating anonymous amusers and suddenly your attempts at using anonymous as a means to garner press attention for yourself how's this for attention you've tried to bite at the anonymous hand and now the anonymous hand is [ __ ] slapping you in the face that was it the hack was over everything that could have been done had been and bar's life was ruined he tried to use anonymous as a vehicle to save his business to elevate his reputation above his peers and to enrich himself in part it worked better than he could ever have expected he got more press attention than he could ever have dreamed of but no one would ever be able to trust his security expertise ever again now to go into a couple more details at the point of when he knew he'd been hacked but before the entire meltdown before everything had been published with nothing left to lose bar logged on to the anonymous chat room to confront sabu tiflo topiary and kegler he was invited to a room called operation hb gary and he took notes of the username some he recognized from his grand investigation and others that were completely new as he entered immediately the taunts began now they're threatening us directly am i right said topiary clearly referencing the email bar hastily sent to warn hp gary management when originally he trolled him into believing he was the target of the operation which of course it turns out he was enjoying the super bowl i hope said q a new member of the group whom joined just to witness the aftermath well mr barr i apologize for what's about to happen to you and your company said tiflo the one who had orchestrated the entire operation in the first place i figured something like this would happen said bar nah you won't like what's coming next replied topiary dude you just don't get it it was research on social media vulnerabilities i was never going to release the names pleaded by liar don't you have a meeting with the fbi monday morning said sabu sabu he totally does replied topiary at this point bar knew that lying was useless they knew everything okay yep they called me he said oh guys what's coming next is the delicious cake replied topiary i have bars ted's and phil's emails all 68 000 said tea flow those emails are going to be pretty replied who should know the member that joined to witness the lulls lol okay guys well you got me right smiley face said bar clearly defeated at this point well aaron thank you for taking part in this little mini social test to see if you'd run to your company with news about anan you did we leached it we laughed dying of fire you are done said topiary bringing their interaction with bar to an abrupt end after this barr called in penny levy to try and speak to the anonymous group and reason with them to stop the madness at first they were even polite though it soon devolved and ended please do not release the hb gary emails there is private information there of clients she said shouldn't be sending emails you don't want your mother reading said hey guys another new face dozens of innocent people could have gone to jail replied sabu referring to bar's investigation which seemed to randomly link people to anonymous cyber attacks despite there being little to no evidence and so the emails were released the hack concluded communications broke down as there was nothing more to be said the initial hack was retaliation for bars claims of being capable of exposing anonymous which was a danger to people who operated under that umbrella it wasn't until the hack was a success that this particular group of anon found evidence of extremely dirty tricks and intricate plans of devious intent such as smear campaigns against trade unions and cyber attacks against websites like wikileaks some people saw this information and retroactively applied that this vigilante justice would be justified and the group became legendary amongst anonymous circles in a secret chat the group celebrated though i'm sure in the back of their mind they knew that this escapade had painted a target on their back that thought didn't stop them from making plans though if they could bring down a cyber security company this easily the scar was the limit and so they banded together against new targets no one was safe a media institution an entertainment goliath not even the fbi itself all in the name of anonymous and all for the lols

Channel: KiraTV

Views: 5,160,696

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Id: uFw66YyHD6E

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022