The Inner World of Gov-Sponsored White-Hat Hacking

romanval writes "Anonymous leaked emails of white-hat hacker firm HBGary shows how it develops and markets products to government agencies. From the article: 'In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge. They focused on ports—a laptop's interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two.'"

Re:Black hat not White

[Securityemo]

So hacking into the government systems of an oppressive government in order to cause it damage somehow as part of a larger campaign to topple it without invading and killing lots of people would be "evil"?

Re:Black hat not White

[Blue Stone]

I guess here at /. the 'editorial' policy is to provoke discussion regardless of the intellectually dishonest manner that's used. Summaries and titles that distort the original article seem to be more and more prevalent in order, I'd take a wild guess at, to provoke comments.

Ladies and gentlement, we are being trolled by the management.

A sad state of affairs.

Re:they take knolwedge form black hats

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Ahhh... Let's cook-up another "Twitter Revolution".

"But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All [dailykos.com]