#aaron barr

[suryaray-blog]

How Aaron Barr correctly identified Commander X

#SuryaRay #Surya Turns out HBGary Federal's Aaron Barr correctly IDed "Commander X." http://dlvr.it/2dJ6kd @suryaray

[jetcityorange]

[refreshpodcast-blog]

Those may have included a mention on Threatpost about Barr's "strange trip" to visit Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, where he dyed his hair blue in an attempt to fit in with protesters and see what they were up to. Barr's name also appeared in a set of emails mistakenly released by another cybersecurity analyst he is friends with, Thomas Ryan. Ryan snuck his way onto an Occupy Wall Street email organizing list, forwarding some of those messages to FBI agents and then releasing a batch of them onto the web.

Being discussed now on Re:Fresh

[knowtoomuch]

Former HBGary Federal CEO fired from latest job for obsessive pursuit of Anonymous

Aaron Barr, a cyber security analyst for federal contractor Sayers and Associates, was recently fired from his latest job for “spending too much time” on his pursuit of Anonymous.

The Huffington Post reported Friday that Barr’s former employer fired Barr for “acting like a “cowboy” on the company dime.” Barr has been involved in numerous programs throughout his career in the security industry, several of which involved his pursuit of hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Barr was the former CEO of security firm HBGary Federal who claimed to have infiltrated the ranks of Anonymous in early 2011 and planned to reveal the “leaders” of the group, despite the fact that Anonymous claims to have no leaders. Anonymous retaliated with the release of thousands of internal emails that linked HBGary Federal to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Barrett Brown – founder of Project PM, a crowdsourced investigation focused on research and analysis of the intelligence contracting industry – alerted The Daily Caller to Barr’s firing late Friday afternoon. Brown is often associated as the public “face” of Anonymous, although he specifically does not speak for the group due to the structure and nature of Anonymous.

Brown told TheDC, “He was fired from his latest job for spending too much time going after Anonymous and presumably me. We suspected he was still up to something — when I met him in NYC, he was with the CEO of Provide Security, which vandalized our wiki when we put up a page on them.”

A wiki is a website which enables users to easily edit content via a web browser. An online associate of Thomas Ryan, a managing partner at Provide Security, by the name of ShadowDXS, was behind the wiki vandilization, Brown told TheDC:

“Thomas Ryan’s online associate did the vandalizing. The fellow, ShadowDXS, was a former Project PM participant who turned on us after Lulzsec fucked with him (no one really liked him).”

Lulzsec was a splinter group of Anonymous that hacked for the “lulz,” or laughs, not financial gain. Lulzsec is a part of a broader “anti-sec” movement, which is opposed to the computer security industry.

“His problem, like that of a lot of people who are after me, is that they can’t accept a loss, emotionally,” said Brown. “They have to feel triumph.”

[kallichaos-blog]

Best Hacks by the Hacktivist Group 'Anonymous'

'Cybergate'

  Credit: Anonymous

In February, Aaron Barr, CEO of the cybersecurity firm HBGary Federal, announced that his firm had successfully infiltrated the Anonymous group and planned to unveil information about its members at an upcoming conference. Anonymous fought back – and won.

First, hackers hacked HBGary Federal's website and replaced the homepage with their logo and a message stating that Anonymous should not be messed with. Using a variety of techniques, they then took down the company's phone system and extracted 70,000 messages from its email system. They created a searchable database of these emails on the Web, and posted a link to them from Barr's Twitter account, which they also hacked into.

The emails revealed some extremely incriminating information about the company, including its plan to cripple the whistleblower organization Wikileaks through cyberattacks and a public campaign of disinformation. What's more, Barr's leaked emails revealed that Hunton & Williams, the law firm that organized the anti-Wikileaks campaign – and that also works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – actually contracted the security firm (along with two others) to have them target political organizations critical of the chamber.

The hack ultimately led to a government investigation of many of the companies involved in the scandal , as well as Aaron Barr's resignation.

[isacrimonie-blog]

Anon's foil Aaron Barr is back...

...and he wants more cybersecurity offensives

«Barr is back in business. Aaron Barr, the former CEO of HBGary Federal, memorably had his corporate e-mail exposed to the world by Anonymous earlier this year after attempting to expose the group's "leadership." Based on our reporting, comedian Stephen Colbert memorably summed up the encounter: "To put this in hacker terms, Anonymous is a hornet's nest, and Barr said, 'I'm going to stick my penis in that thing.»

Source : Ars Technica

[isacrimonie-blog]

«It was an "Elvis Meets Nixon " kind of moment: former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr sporting blue hair and posing in front of a van sporting the Wikileaks logo down at New York's Zuccotti Park , home of the Occupy Wall Street protest. What was he doing there? It's complicated.

In an interview with Threatpost, Barr said he wanted to be on-hand on the day of the protest in part to observe what role, if any, his arch nemesis - the anarchic hacking group Anonymous - played in the events that transpired. But Barr's e-mail address also turned up on dispatch to the New York FBI by Thomas Ryan, an independent security consultant who has admitted to informing on the doings of OWS organizers, prompting Barr critics called 'foul,' accusing him of trying to undermine the popular protests. Barr, it would seem, was ...err...poking the Anonymous hornet's nest once again.»

Source : Threat Post

Read more :

Anon's foil Aaron Barr is back—and he wants more cybersecurity offensives

Anonymous Hacks Security Firm Investigating It; Releases E-mail

[sarahlee310-blog]

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.