It s difficult to say if Aaron Barr, then CEO of software security company HBGary Federal, was in his right mind when he targeted the notorious hacking group known as Anonymous. He was trying to correlate Facebook and IRC activity to reveal the identities of the group s key figures. In the shadowy world of black-hat hacking, getting your true identity revealed is known as getting doxed1, and is something every hacker fears.
Going after such a well-known group would be sure to get his struggling company some needed publicity. It would also have the most unfortunate side effect of getting the hacking groups attention as well.
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Aaron Barr
Perhaps Aaron Barr expected Anonymous to come after him maybe he even welcomed the confrontation. After all, he was an expert in software security.
He ran his own security company. His CTO Greg Hoglund wrote a book about rootkits and maintained the website rootkits.com that boasted over 80 thousand registered users. Surely he could manage a few annoying attacks from a couple of teenage script kiddies playing on their parent s computer.
It would have been impossible for him to know how wrong he was.
It took the handful of hackers less that 24 hours to take complete control over the HBGary Federal website and databases. They also seized Barr s Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and even his World of Warcraft account. They replaced the HBGary Federal homepage with this declaration2 with a link to a torrent file containing some 50,000 emails resting ominously at the bottom.
At the same time, they were able to use social engineering techniques to SSH into the rootkit.com site and delete its entire contents.
It became clear that these handful of Anonymous hackers were good. Very good. This article will focus on the core of the HBGary hackers that would go on to form the elite LulzSec group.
Future articles in this new and exciting Dark Arts series will focus on some of the various hacking techniques they used. Techniques including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote file inclusion and many others. We will keep our focus on how these techniques work and how they can be thwarted with better security practices.
LulzSec For the Lulz
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Name: Jake Davis
Alias: Topiary
Age at Arrest: 18
Hometown: Shetland Islands, Scotland
Role: Spokesperson
Jake Davis aka Topiary might have been the least technically skilled of the group, but he made up for it in his ability with words.
He was by far the most articulate of the group and commanded the official LulzSec Twitter feed, where he taunted the group s victims and appeased their ever-growing fan base. Topiary goes back to the days of Anonymous and its origin on the popular image board 4chan. Being articulate and quick-witted, he was exceptionally good at doing prank calls while streaming them live to eager fans. His talent did not go unrecognized and the role of mouthpiece for Anonymous was his for the taking.
Whenever a home page was defaced and replaced with an official Anonymous message, he was the author. The hacked HBGary homepage linked above was Topiary s work.
Lest we leave you with the impression that Topiary was not a hacker, he learned a great deal of technical skills during his involvement with Anonymous and later Lulzsec. When he was arrested at his home on the Shetland Islands, he had 17 virtual machines running on an encrypted drive.
His last tweet before his arrest You cannot arrest an idea .
Name: Mustafa Al-BassamImage may be NSFW.
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Alias: Tflow
Age at Arrest: 16
Hometown: London, England
Role: Highly skilled coder
Mustafa Al-Bassam aka Tflow was a bit socially awkward, but you would have never known it based on his demeanor in the secluded chat rooms of the Lulzsec hackers. Cool, calm and collected, Tflow never got involved with the many arguments that took place. The ability to check his emotions combined with advanced coding skills led his fellow hackers to believe he was much older than he really was. Pwnsauce, another Lulzsec member whom we will not cover due to lack of information, believed he was at least 30 years old.
It was Tflow who first shed light on Aaron Barr s plans to dox the Anonymous leaders .
It was Tflow who wrote an advanced piece of code that allowed the citizens of Tunisia to get past their government s ISP restrictions during the Arab Spring and post on social media. Let that sink in for a minute a 16-year-old teenager had empowered an entire nation of people with a PHP script. The Jester, a hacker who commanded a massive bot-net, once tried to hoodwink Tflow and his fellow hackers with a malicious script. Tflow took the script, reduced it from a few dozen lines to only two lines without limiting functionality, and sent it back to The Jester with the following note: Try this instead.
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Name: Ryan Ackroyd
Alias: Kayla
Age at Arrest: 24
Hometown: South Yorkshire, England
Role: Server Penetration
Ryan Ackroyd was big into computer video games as a teen. He liked hacking them and hung out online with other like-minded people.
A girl by the name of Kayla joined their circle of friends and Ryan enjoyed her company. A rival video game hacking group tried to hack Ryan s group, and targeted the weakest link 16-year-old Kayla. They destroyed her social networks and even got into her parent s bank account. Ryan and his friends were furious.
They all went after their rival, using the alias Kayla in her honor. Their retribution was so devastating that Kayla earned a reputation across this particular corner of the internet as someone not to cross. Over the years, the group fell apart, but Ryan remained and kept the alias of a 16 year old girl named Kayla who shouldn t be messed with.
It was Kayla who socially engineered her way into rootkit.com.
It was Kayla who discovered the SQL injection insecurity on the HBGary Federal website. She later wrote a program that scanned URLs many times per second looking for zero days6. She s a self-taught reverse engineer and was arguably the most skilled hacker on the Lulzsec team.
She even had a trip wire in her apartment that wiped all hard drives when the police entered, and was branded by the courts as highly forensically aware . That s legalese for This guy knows his stuff . She has some wise words in this reddit thread7.
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Name: Hector Monsegur
Alias: Sabu
Age at Arrest: 28
Hometown: New York City
Role: Leader & Skilled Hacker
Hector Monsegur aka Sabu was the oldest and most mature of the Lulzsec hackers.
He was the recognized leader of the group. He drove daily operations and squashed arguments. He was also a very skilled hacker himself, coming from a background of hacking government websites in his native Puerto Rico. Sabu was a hactivist, and believed in hacking for a social cause, while many of his team were still beholden to their 4chan/b/ days of hacking for the lulz . Sabu was not only a hacker of computers, he was a hacker of people, and highly skilled in the art of social engineering.
Using his skills, he was able to steer LulzSec in the direction he wanted it to go.
Sabu was the first of the LulzSec hackers to get doxxed. When he was confronted by the FBI with a 100+ year prison sentence, he could not bear the idea of his kids growing up without him and turned informant. He has only recently returned to twitter9, much to the annoyance of Anonymous.
Now What?
You have met the core of the LulzSec hackers.
There are two more that we did not talk about due to lack of information: Pwnsauce and AVUnit. As of today, no one knows the true identity of AVUnit. It s possible there are even more that we don t know about.
However, it is generally recognized that the hackers covered here were the core members.
Now that we know a little bit about the people behind some of the most remarkable hacks of modern times, we will go into detail about how they were able to carry these hacks out. If you re looking for a How to Hack a Website 101 tutorial, this series of articles will disappoint you. But if you want to know how these former hackers were able to do what they did, you will find this series quite enjoyable.
We re not just going to talk about the various techniques used, we re going to understand how they work on a fundamental level.
So stay tuned and keep your virtual machines on standby.
Sources
We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency, by Parmy Olsen.
ISBN-978-0316213523
References
- ^ doxed (en.wikipedia.org)
- ^ with this declaration (hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com)
- ^ Twitter (twitter.com)
- ^ Twitter (twitter.com)
- ^ Twitter (twitter.com)
- ^ zero days (en.wikipedia.org)
- ^ reddit thread (www.reddit.com)
- ^ Twitter (twitter.com)
- ^ returned to twitter (www.ibtimes.co.uk)
The post The Dark Arts: Meet the LulzSec Hackers appeared first on News4Security.