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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Alex Kingsbury
With 'Anonymous' hackers and proposed Washington dirty tricks, it could come from a Steig Larsson novel
The cast of the drama could have come from the keyboard of Swedish noir crime novelist Stieg Larsson: a group of rambunctious hackers, a secretive private security company, a powerful Washington law firm with notable clients, and the bête noire of bureaucrats, WikiLeaks.
The opening act came in December, when WikiLeaks published a trove of
Enter Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, who was quoted in the
Barr's braggadocio didn't sit well with the hacker collective, who then apparently broke into HBGary Federal's computer system and stole tens of thousands of E-mails and posted them on the Internet, hijacked Barr's Twitter account, posted his supposed home address and social security number, and defaced HBGary Federal's website. "Let us teach you a lesson you'll never forget: don't mess with Anonymous," the group said in a statement posted along with the stolen materials.
HBGary Federal posted a statement on their website saying that they were the victim of a cyber attack by Anonymous, which "stole proprietary and confidential information." The company has also said that E-mails posted online may have been altered by the hackers.
The story could have ended there, but when journalists and others examined the stolen E-mails, they uncovered evidence of proposals for attacking critics of the
One of the proposals included in the E-mails appeared to deal with
It also proposed numerous strategies for gathering personal information about critics, including trolling social networking sites, like
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WikiLeaks Scandal Spurs Hackers vs. Lobbyist Fight | Politics
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