Rolling Stone magazine talked about the journey to arrest hacker leader Jeremy Hammond of Anonymous as well as describe the chaos and darkness of the hackers world with talented, eccentric and hidden people.
On a cold day in mid-December 2011, hackers with the nickname sup_g sat for hours on the computer with the goal of making a spectacular attack (which would later be reported as the digital world's atomic bomb). on Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, which specializes in providing analysis related to the military, economic and political situation for customers to limit risks.
As a core member of Anonymous group, sup_g has infiltrated Stratfor's web server system, thus discovering treasure including password, unencrypted credit card data, customer list . But the most attractive is 860,000 e-mails with 3 million messages containing sensitive content.
Stratfor is the biggest and richest prey of Anonymous. Not only does it provide political - political analysis for every Pentagon organization to the United Nations, it also provides security services for leading companies like Raytheon or Dow Chemical. On Christmas, Anonymous held more than 200 GB of Stratfor data, and posted a winning message on the company's website: "Disaster is not coming soon, it's already here" . The hacker group also plans to use credit cards to donate to charities like CARE or American Red Cross.
Sup_g always works quite subside, carefully hiding real names and using many different aliases. But three months later, on the night of March 5, 2012, more than a dozen police broke into a small house in southwestern Chicago and arrested 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond, a hacker who believed it was sup_g.
The arrest was a great victory for the FBI by Anonymous claiming to conduct a battle at the highest level and scale "against corrupt governments, organizations, military and corrupt law enforcement agencies. around the world " . The group closed the CIA website, several banks, government websites of Libya, Tunisia, Egypt ., entered the NATO system, GEO Group and captured the FBI.
But no battle is as shocking as Stratfor. Hammond, never acknowledged any of the nine aliases that the FBI believed to be his, insisted that he was impersonal in the "Stratfor disaster" . But Hammond does not deny that he is related to Anonymous. He has been detained at the Metropolitan Correctional Center for the past 8 months and is still awaiting trial.
Since coming here, Hammond has always kept him busy by teaching maths to other prisoners, playing chess and reading. In addition to a lawyer, Rolling Stone reporter is the only guest (not a relative) allowed to visit Hammond.
With IQ 168, Hammond "speaks as fast as if his mouth does not catch up with thoughts in his head," a friend described. At school, this hacker is one of the smartest children and is always more focused on what he is taught at school.
The road to Anonymous
From the age of 22, Hammond was named "Internet Hood by Robin" by Chicago magazine when he was imprisoned for nearly two years for stealing 5,000 credit cards for charity. In 2008, Hammond was released from prison and began a new life. He began to know Anonymous but did not pay much attention. After that, he noticed the political potential of Anonymous when conducting Operation Avenge Assange in October 2010 with the aim of punishing PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and some other financial institutions for stopping processing related transactions. to Wikileaks.
There was a character in Anonymous that made Hammond very impressed. It was Sabu, his real name was Hector Xavier Monsegur, born in 1983. Monsegur lived in a drug-selling family and his father was imprisoned for heroin trafficking in 1997. He had innate talent in computers. From the age of 14, Monsegur sought free Internet access, taught himself Linux, Unix and open source networks.
While Hammond considers hacking a battle tool, Monsegur sees hacking as a way to escape the life he is experiencing every day. Initially, Monsegur worked for a Swiss security company. But in 2010, Monsegur started hacking for profit like stealing credit cards to pay personal bills, digging into auto companies to order components for their cars. Nicknamed Sabu, Monsegur joined Anonymous and since January 2011, he has launched Freedom Ops campaign targeting a series of government websites.
Meanwhile, the FBI began to keep an eye on Anonymous since 2010, but they were like people who found their way during the night, no one knew who Anonymous was. To help the government and more importantly, to win a contract for its HBGary Federal firm, security expert Aaron Barr decides to find out for himself. In early 2011, Barr informed Financial Times that he was in the hands of Anonymous.
Although Barr's documents were later determined to be inaccurate, Anonymous began to see a great risk. On February 6, 2011, Sabu formed the Internet Feds group to attack HBGary's website, control Barr's Twitter account and the company's 68,000 e-mail database and post it on the Pirate Bay site. Within a day, news of the attack spread throughout the world and Barr had to resign.
Following this event, Hammond was surprised. For the next few months, Hammond's impression continued to increase and he decided to join Anonymous. At this time, Internet Feds turned into Lulz Security, or Lulzsec, led by Sabu and another talent, Topiary. From March 7, the group made a "Lulz 50 days" campaign with a series of collapsed government, game and porn websites.
Treachery
However, on the first day of June, Anonymous members discovered Sabu disappeared online for 24 hours, which he had never done. When he returned, Sabu explained that his grandmother had died. The group accepted but began to see Sabu's attitude change. He became more friendly and called everyone a brother in a house.
On June 19, 2011, Sabu launched Operation Antisec "the largest in hacker history". At the end of June, Lulzsec launched hundreds of sensitive information pages related to legal organizations in Arizona. According to the FBI, this is Hammond's first criminal activity, or sup_g, under Anonymous membership. Gradually, sup-g becomes the main character in about 10 core members of Antisec. Almost all group activities are through sup_g, including writing press releases.
Meanwhile, Sabu called for attacks but almost never hacked. Anonymous members began to doubt Sabu when she tried to avoid letting her hand dip. But Sabu has a talent that no one denies: getting precious information helps hackers like sup_g exploit the vulnerability at the highest level.
Information about the "FBI informant" Sabu just spread out the same day Hammond was arrested. Initially, Anonymous did not believe in betrayal in the group. But after Sabu's indictment was revealed in the press, the shock turned into anger and sadness. Some Anonymous members said they were suspicious of Sabu as a fraud.
Connecting events, Anonymous realized that on June 7, 2011, the day Sabu disappeared online during those 24 hours, the day he heard knocking at home. Outside were two FBI agents who said they had gathered enough evidence of Sabu's activities in Anonymous to imprison him for 122 years.
Within a few hours, Sabu agreed to work for the FBI and provide information about her teammates at LulzSec. After that, he opened Operation Antisec campaign (including the attack on Stratfor in December 2011) and was responsible for collecting data for the government. That means, since June 19, 2011, all of Antisec's activities have been in the FBI's sights with the aim of arresting the leader, Jeremy Hammond.
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