HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hbgary-federal-ceo-aaron-barr-steps-down-022811

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

119 71 15 years ago

threatpost.com

bane2• 15 years ago

At this point they're going to just have to change the name of the company.

jtdowney• 15 years ago

Kind of like the division of Diebold that made voting machines became Premier Election Solutions

bane2• 15 years ago

Right, or Blackwater -> XE

shareme2• 15 years ago

WeHuntedAnonymousButLost?

jaredmck• 15 years ago

Aaron Barr might want to change his name as well...

wmf• 15 years ago

Maybe it's a common enough name that he can just say "no, I'm the other Aaron Barr".

shareme2• 15 years ago

WESuckAtSecurityButThriveOnIllegalSpying

jonknee2• 15 years ago

It's stupid/frustrating in this day and age that changing the company's name after a big fuck up actually works.

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

It has always worked.

Tallyrand, Napoleon's Foreign Minister, observed that one of the functions of a government is to rename institutions which have, under the old name, become odious.

tzs• 15 years ago

On the other hand, it is great for companies that are falsely accused, and the false accusation sticks. I've seen people make the most ridiculous false claims on forums, then others find these when Googling and repeat them any time the company gets mentioned. Several years later, someone will mention that company in passing, and then someone pops up saying they plant child porn on your computer or steal your credit card.

It's nice when going into a new line of business to be able to do it under a new name and not have to deal with that crap.

Nate75Sanders• 15 years ago

We need websites that track _individuals_ for their reputation instead of just businesses.

I recently had a moving company move my car across the country. I picked the #1 rated broker in the United States the last 2 years running. They're just the broker, though. They pick an actual trucking company to move your car. I found out that the individuals involved in the company moving my car had opened 3 other companies in the past 4 years and closed them all. I dug more and found that they had absolutely horrible ratings on the biggest rating site for car-hauling companies and also horrible ratings on the BBB site. Luckily, I got my car without incident, but we need a good way to track scum.

If you tried hard and played by the rules in business and didn't do shady things and failed, then I can understand trying again without serious stigma, but if you're forming new companies all the time, you should be informally punished through lots of information/transparency. It's easy to say "don't go with a company that hasn't been around for X years", but that's really unfair to legit startups trying to innovate.

We need a better answer to this problem.

drinian2• 15 years ago

Are you familiar with Whuffie, which was a fictional reputational currency?

I'm pretty sure that with the advent of decentralized currencies like BitCoin, we could probably implement Whuffie now.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Whuffie

nickolai• 15 years ago

Something like this -> http://xkcd.com/796/ ?

georgieporgie3• 15 years ago

This is wildly irrelevant, but I have to ask: does anyone else experience profound irritation at the name "HBGary"?

Every time I read the name, my reading flow stops and I stare at the name. HBWhat? Does that stand for something? Are they initials? Who is Gary? Are they from Indiana?

It triggers this bizarre, deep-down irritation like nothing else I've ever seen.

michaelcampbell• 15 years ago

I don't have quite the same reaction, but my gut instinct thinks the company name is something my 10 year old son would have come up with. If his name was Gary, anyway.

It's right on par with naming your company "ImSo$#@!Awesome Inc." or something.

edkennedy• 15 years ago

In pick up artist lingo, HB stands for "Hot Babe" to keep their names anonymous. So for example you meet a girl with a hotrod you would call her HBHotrod. Had to chuckle when I saw the name HBGary.

GHFigs• 15 years ago

Likewise for GoDaddy, hhgregg, and scores of startup names. It's like my brain is looking for a meaningful word and halts briefly when it can't find one. Textual basilisks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks

Groxx• 15 years ago

GoDaddy just always makes me think porn before DNS. I can't imagine what thoughts were going through their heads when they thought "GoDaddy. Yeah. That makes me think 'major DNS server'. Lets go with that."

To make matters worse, they've got women wearing shirts that say "GoDaddy" on their front page. Gotta wonder what their target audience is, with that featuring so prominently.

Splines• 15 years ago

Whenever I was reading the news about HBGary, I kept scanning the articles for someone named Gary. I don't think I ever found any (is there one?).

sp_• 15 years ago

The name comes from the three co-founders. The H is for Hoglund (Greg). The B is for Bracken (Shawn). The Gary is for Jon Gary who left the company shortly after it was founded.

georgieporgie3• 15 years ago

Thank you for that. The name is still irritating to me, but at least now I know it's not nonsensical.

jarin• 15 years ago

My question is what did Jon Gary do to get his whole name in there?

gojomo• 15 years ago

I had just assumed it was based on names of people associated with its founding, like JDEdwards, JDPower, TD Waterhouse, HP, Lockheed-Martin or even the Debian project. (Do those other arbitrary names trigger a similar irritation?)

With HBGary, though, only the 'H' can be clearly attributed to a founder declared on their 'about' page, Greg Hogland. But they probably had other people in mind for the rest at the founding.

icegreentea• 15 years ago

The TD in TD Waterhouse actually stands for Toronto-Dominion. They picked that up after the merger of the Bank of Toronto and the Dominion Bank of Canada waaaaay back then.

Maro• 15 years ago

I agree. I always want to pronounce it H-G-Barry instead of H-B-Gary, for some reason that's how it flows in my mind. They should just stick with HBG.

phlux2• 15 years ago

I have the same problem with any company that has the word "solutions" in their name.

My problem with it is that by having the term "solutions" in your name, you have a clearly defined problem for which your company is the only answer. Invariably, I find that any company with the word "solutions" in their name cannot succinctly define what it is they do.

They imply they are the solution to something, but I just see it as a company founded by the marketing department.

m0nastic2• 15 years ago

This is the first positive thing I've read to come out of this fiasco (and I don't say that lightly, as I am particularly sensitive to companies suffering security breaches; but they've handled this about as poor as one could).

_b8r0• 15 years ago

Without Barr, it's likely that Federal is over (that is assuming that it isn't already over regardless), which is probably not a bad thing for HBGary but will be for anyone who invested in federal.

I think the lesson for everyone here is not to fund a company sharing your brand name without some degree of control over what they're doing and the ability to immediately fire the guy in charge if they endanger the parent.

Aetius• 15 years ago

The lesson is to screen for and not hire giant egotistical douchebags who will write checks that they can't cash.

motters2• 15 years ago

The internet amplifies reputational risk. My guess is that if HBGary has any future they will at the very minimum have to change their company name. Reading some of the leaked emails provides (at least for me) a shocking insight into the dark side of the internet and how social networks can be abused for sinister purposes. Assuming HBGary isn't the only company involved in these sorts of machinations it raises some really big and serious questions about the future of democracy and the ability of governments to create fake consensus using "persona management software".

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

The power of publicity (both negative and positive) is now in the hands of everyone not just the hands of powerful institutions such as the traditional press or the government. Wikileaks and anonymous' hijinx are just one example of the brave new world we're entering, it'll be fascinating to see how it will play out.

stcredzero8• 15 years ago

My hunch is that this very social network and its close cousin reddit are being manipulated by groups following discordian ideologies. In short, it's being manipulated for fun and "profit." ("Profit" in the form of media-manipulation capability.) In other words, it's being manipulated for the LULZ. (By people who don't know how to analyze what they read and argue cogently.)

The flavor of logic and discourse on this site has taken a definite turn for the worse. Nonsensical and somewhat juvenile reactions to my comments occur with frightening regularity.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270002

khafra2• 15 years ago

By "Discordian," I'm thinking you mean the TAZ-theory and other stuff from RAW's other work, not so much the carefree pranksterism of the Principia Discordia, right? Either way, it's a model for which I hold such a low prior probability that it would take a lot of evidence to convince me, but the latter seems to have more internal consistency.

As for your link, people thought you were talking about the overreaching of the Tolkien estate; you were talking about what appeared to be a button taking sides in an imaginary cultural divide. Simple miscommunication.

motters2• 15 years ago

I don't know anything about LULZ, but given the content of the HBGary emails it's entirely possible that "personas" are deployed on this and other noteworthy forums, in accordance with their rent-a-bot business model. However, at least on HN it would be difficult for these to be "botted out", due to the usually higher quality commenting, although voting up "noisy" submissions could degrade the overall quality.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Their "personas" didn't do a very good job.

learner4life• 15 years ago

The most disturbing thing about this episode is that DOJ referred BoA to HBGary. It is truly scary when government is in the business of targeting its own individuals. One has to wonder how it is different from Ben Ali or Gaddafi targeting their own people. Sure the scale is different, but the principle is the same.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Actually, DOJ recommended the law firm that ended up talking to HBGary and Palantir and ... whoever the third one was.

Not that it isn't egregious for the DOJ to recommend reputation fixup to Bank of America because BoA is presumably about to get hammered by Wikileaks disclosure.

defroost• 15 years ago

Who didn't see that coming after the embarrassing fiasco with Anonymous? I've been following this story pretty closely via Salon.com and the excellent series at Ars Technica and it seemed to be only a matter of time for Barr to make an exit.

tscrib2• 15 years ago

Indeed. Ars Technica has been covering it in excellent depth. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier. From the onset, especially HBGary's reaction, it seemed the only way out was that Barr would be canned or step down.

da5e• 15 years ago

Stieg Larsson's new book would be, The Boy Who Stuck His Penis in a Hornet's Nest.

adrianwaj• 15 years ago

Pwned from the outside and then barred from within. Nice.

Anon's comments under that article really rub it in. No mercy at all.

mistermann2• 15 years ago

Some of the stuff he was doing was pretty clever, and he'll have no shortage of customers if he continues down that path. Taking on Anonymous for advertising purposes however has turned out to be not too bright. His former clients are distancing themselves as fast as possible, but next time they'll just make sure their payments can't be traced to them. "Oh, we didn't know he was doing such things". Bullshit....most companies don't care about ethics, and the US government certainly doesn't at a fundamental level either.

He'll do just fine.

tscrib2• 15 years ago

The government and large defence companies certainly do care about ethics. It's just a different 'kind' of ethics than you would normally envision. Its more about your appearance to the general public, and your market than anything else. If the general public perceives your action an unethical, then it is, and it is detrimental to your company.

I've worked for several defence contractors, and each one is crazy about ethical training. Monthly online ethics training courses are mandatory. Any perception of wrongdoing is incredibly harmful when dealing with the federal government. Billion dollar contracts are won and lost based on those perceptions.

mistermann2• 15 years ago

But they don't care about ethics for ethical reasons, they care about them for PR reasons...but maybe thats what you said.

My point was, many customers,the government included, would love to have some of this information, and access to social botnets. The background of the seller is irrelevant.

Of course your ethical training at work is top notch. I've done work at similar companies, and I have to pass ethical tests on a regular basis, yet, we have incidents that set records, in a bad way. If you think taking tests at work means your company is taking something seriously, you haven't been working long enough. :)

HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down

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