Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/03/16/is-this-the-girl-that-hacked-hbgary/

by r11t • 15 years ago

211 131 15 years ago

blogs.forbes.com

aphyr• 15 years ago

Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans.

And people call me paranoid. :)

wildmXranat• 15 years ago

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ...

If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

storborg• 15 years ago

Not to mention that she gave a lot of personal history surrounding her parents and family history. That might not uniquely identify her, but it does narrow the search considerably. My guess: if he/she is even a single real person, much of this is fabricated.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

That is what I was thinking. Ya know, you probably don't want to disclose your operational security procedures because well, they aren't common and not being common, their trackable.

And then I was thinking about how the police sometimes "leak" that the suspect in some crime is weak, pathetic, individual which nobody really cares about, in hopes that they will offend the real suspect who will then self identify in defense of their honor. If you thought the Anonymous ring leader on the HBGary hack was some teenage guy then the best way to provoke a response would be to either call him gay or a girl it seems.

I wonder how well the E-book Ars put out is selling. And more importantly, if its really successful I wonder if these people who did this are comfortable with someone getting rich off their exploits?

You see? The twisted depths to which you go if you start down these paths. Sheesh.

oniTony3• 15 years ago

I figure that such setups could employ a number of cron scripts to spread out actions and/or generate noise. E.g. every <random_range> minutes delete a random email out of a set of everything older than 24 hours. Adjust the constants to match the volume of information.

drinian• 15 years ago

Yeah, no mention of encryption, even. This doesn't smell right.

SageRaven5• 15 years ago

I don't know... what came to mind after reading "deletes every email in her inbox" was POP, which pretty much always deletes your remote mail once it's been retrieved. How many millions of people still use POP over IMAP or webmail? Quite a few I would guess.

For 5+ years, I've been downloading my email with fetchmail, which deletes the message on the server. Once a minute. I don't like the thought of my emails sitting in the cloud for too long.

SageRaven5• 15 years ago

In light of recent Anon-related police raids, I would hope that anyone supposedly as savvy as "k" would rely on full-disk crypto as opposed to foolishly going the destruction of evidence route.

I've used FDE for many years simply out of precaution against theft.

Retric• 15 years ago

In the US fill disk crypto is useless. They will just hold you in jail until you hand them the password.

stef25• 15 years ago

I wonder what wiping of a web account exactly involves. Email, FB? Sounds like something a journalist would say without really knowing what they are talking about.

andyv• 15 years ago

Since the girl is a person and not a thing, it should be "... girl who hacked hbgary". r11t copied the mistake from Forbes-- How do national magazines make grammatical errors like this? Don't these people have editors who at least earned a passing grade in middle school English?

tedunangst• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_relative_clauses

1) usage is disputed at a level beyond middle school English.

2) "that" is often preferred for restrictive clauses.

syllogism• 15 years ago

Mostly because that's not really a grammatical error:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=girl+that,girl+wh...

Middle school English teachers love to invent simple rules of the language that don't reflect actual usage very well. The choice between "that" and "who" as relativisers is subtle, and the animacy constraint doesn't explain the facts of how people speak.

jemfinch• 15 years ago

Shakespeare wrote in the Merchant of Venice of "the man that hath no music in himself". Mark Twain wrote a short story titled "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg". Ira Gershwin wrote a popular song titled "The Man that Got Away". These are just the examples easily available on Wikipedia.

Your complaint does not represent majority usage in English, let alone modern usage.

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

"andyv, the man that knows little about modern grammar."

Oh the horror.

ErrantX2• 15 years ago

This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity.

This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps).

On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very well constructed one, which the imposter empathises with.

But, on the whole, the setup "feels" wrong (and I tend to trust my instincts in such matters).

nkassis2• 15 years ago

Hiding in plain sight is also a good trick. She might be what we think she is or not, doubt gives her/him some protection.

weego• 15 years ago

Indeed, and there are 2 references in the various tales of a good understanding and practice of social engineering, and anyone with that understanding would not go around telling the press genuine background stories that could start to be pieced together.

But then of course the smartest ones are the people no one will ever hear about, so who knows.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

Oh.. I know this one. It turns out to be Kevin Spacey in the end.

bballbackus• 15 years ago

I fail to pickup on how the personality in the interview seemed strongly female. Could you give an example?

ErrantX2• 15 years ago

Not just from this piece, I did a little more digging and my impression was that this person comes across as female (based on the sort of language used, areas of interest etc.).

Estragon• 15 years ago

Not to mention, it must be humiliating for HBGary to be thought of the world as hackable by a 16 year-old girl.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Why? Kids are smart and have time. 16 is not that young. I knew how to do SQL injection and buffer overflow exploitation at that age, although I also knew not to use those skills against someone who didn't ask for it.

Basically, everyone is excited because she's a girl.

famousactress2• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's interesting to guess.. There are mild grammar errors in each longer sentence she's quoted with.. and two of them conflict strangely (she uses 'into' correctly once, but not again). I'm just playing detective, but either smells like someone young.. or like someone intentionally peppering grammar issues to sound it. I dunno. If I had to vote I'd call BS. I think it's someone older.

noahc7• 15 years ago

When I had a lot more time, I would go into Yahoo chat and basically phish for pedophiles usernames/passwords. I can tell you that a "hehe" after anything will set the hook.

I could on average phish about an account a minute and I was never figured out. I only fell out of character once to warn an 18 year old kid, that talking to 14 year old girls sexually online wasn't the best use of his time. He freaked out and thought I was a cop!

It's relatively trivial to do this, most people will ignore minor slip ups provided you have the right context. I would set context by doing the following:

1. I would set my profile to the geolocation of the room I intended to work. I would then find a school and neighborhood to say I was from.

2. I would suggest I was home sick (and thus alone).

3. I would use an innocent, although, sexual name in my username like "booty"

4. I would use emoticons and "hehe" on probably 75% of all messages sent.

5. I would let them contact me first. If you contact them they get scared. If they contact you, they feel like they are in control.

For example, I could tell them the wrong name and many wouldn't notice, or if they did simply saying, "Oh, that's my middle name" is usually sufficient.

With all that said, anyone know of a way I could use my experiences and ability at social engineering online in a legit manner?

eli• 15 years ago

That is... pretty creepy.

awj• 15 years ago

> With all that said, anyone know of a way I could use my experiences and ability at social engineering online in a legit manner?

See if Chris Hansen is hiring?

nyellin2• 15 years ago

Interesting. What was your motivation?

noahc7• 15 years ago

Previous comment here related to multiple down votes I received. I jumped the gun and lesson learned.

lsb2• 15 years ago

Welcome to the internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are cops.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546789

gridspy• 15 years ago

This would be a great answer to the "Real life hacking" YC question, especially with your mention of the formula behind human interaction you discuss in another reply.

dhughes• 15 years ago

Finding one in Yahoo! Chat in the 90s wasn't very hard it was tough trying to find someone, anyone to chat with who wasn't a pedophile, those chatrooms were insane! ...and the webcams too!

gaelian• 15 years ago

Going back about 10 years, there was a community that made a pseudo-sport out of this kind of activity and similar online masquerades, it was called baiting.org. The site is still up, though inactive.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

I've hung out in the anonops irc quite a bit, and `k certainly comes across as female. I hadn't linked her to the Kayla > YOU spam before, but that was almost 3 years ago, now. If it is a constructed identity, then it's been carefully cultivated.

It is an awesome story, though. Regardless of whether it's true or not, it's effective at both rallying the neckbeards and shaming opponents. It's funny to see how much deference is paid to her on IRC, although I only started going there after news of the HBGary incident broke, so she already had quite a lot of cred.

`k may or may not be a 16 year old girl, but it's a hell of a troll if she isn't. I'm not aware of many anons who could pull something like that off for so long. There were a few back in the day who had managed to become trusted enough at anontalk to get promoted to wiseguys, but that took a couple months, not a couple years. For that reason, as well as her general demeanor, I'm inclined to believe her.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

On a more technical note regarding the described background, "Kayla" apparently started by learning how to break software and exploit bugs by her dad and grew up learning about the Linux Kernel... then moved to SQL injection.

That last bit makes absolutely no sense. It's easier to learn SQL injection than the many, many different ways that memory management can go wrong. References to her memorising Windows Opcodes sound like a random phrase thrown in for credibility (you do after a while remember certain functions - 11 years after writing my first ARM shellcode I still remember it, even though I'll probably never use it).

The whole description of how she progressed just doesn't sound right. You can be up and running with SQL injection in less than an hour, learning buffer overflows and understanding them properly probably takes about a day and a bit at best (and that's assuming that you know C, how to use a debugger and how a compiler works). The Micro-SD strategy also seems a little extreme (but is viable, our testing gets done under a VM, there's no reason why that couldn't go on a micro SD card).

I'm calling BS on Kayla being a girl, mainly because the story just doesn't fit right compared to the application of Occam's Razor - that this is someone else trying to cover their tracks.

sophacles• 15 years ago

When you have an expert parent (or other adult influence) you can, and frequently do, learn things in a "weird" order. Further study after study from teaching land shows that "the natural order" to learn things is not nearly as fixed as one would think, the order you learned in is not the only way. The order you were taught in is not the only alternative way.

I remember I started learning in C, reading security and working on perl all the same time. I didn't even know about SQL for a couple years after that. This was in the late 90's and early 00's tho, things were a bit different, but it isn't improbable nor impractical to have this learning curve in a semi-self taught way. It is even less improbably given that her dad probably taught what he knew best, C and Kernel stuff.

When I was a kid, my grandfather was an electrician. I grew up learning about house wiring, and how to do it properly and quickly. I learned how to solder and do stuff with wires long before I ever did basic electronic theory stuff. It never occurred to me that 120VAC was any more dangerous than a small fire. Imagine my surprise when in college I first encountered these professors who were terrified of wall current ('of course it will hurt you, just don't be stupid' is still how i think of both fire and electricity, the stuff isn't magic). I was confused when we went over stupid "this is how a dpdt switch works" and annoyed that we never played with any circuits more advanced than I grew up doing for over a year. I had never had any basic electronic theory at that point.

So: do you disbelieve me because I didn't learn in some natural progression as an electrician apprentice would? Because I didn't learn in the order the courses laid out in college?

tl; dr -- the idea of a "natural progression" in learning is just bunk.

arkitaip• 15 years ago

Wait, Forbes actually linked to http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz ? HAH.

rikthevik• 15 years ago

I'd really like to see the look on the face of the average Forbes reader after clicking on an ED link.

mishmash• 15 years ago

And "ED" likely means something entirely different to what I imagine the typical Forbes reader to be.

tbrownaw• 15 years ago

..they also linked directly to /b/ . I thought they were supposed to be businessey and respectable and such?

nostrademons3• 15 years ago

I wonder what this does to their PageRank...

socillion3• 15 years ago

what happened to mentioning that websites are NSFW? I pity anyone who followed the /b/ link while at work.

gnufied• 15 years ago

NSFW.

SageRaven5• 15 years ago

Is the phrase "Windows Opcodes" (from the article) a subtle troll on the part of "k" or a journalistic goof? I'm no programmer by any stretch, but that phrase jumped out at me as phony. I know there are system calls for operating systems, and opcodes are processor instructions, so this use of the term raised my b.s. meter a notch.

joshu• 15 years ago

Came here to say this. Well caught.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

It could be something an editor slipped in there to "punch up" the tech jargon, for all we know.

SageRaven5• 15 years ago

I guess the phrase seemed particularly egregious precisely because the rest of the article was pretty accurate with the tech terminology.

antihero2• 15 years ago

Perhaps they meant the kernel interrupt codes?

dguido• 15 years ago

Hate to break it to you but that actually means something. The technical details are surprisingly on target for being written by a tech journalist.

Ex. http://www.metasploit.com/users/opcode/syscalls.html

SageRaven5• 15 years ago

Not sure I see your point. Sure, the URL has "opcode" in it, but the page clearly says "Windows System Call Table" -- nowhere is the word "opcode" mentioned on that page.

begemot• 15 years ago

Why is this upvoted? It's clearly wrong, those are syscalls to the windows kernel.

nikcub2• 15 years ago

correct. opcodes are unique to a processor architecture, not an operating system.

jcl• 15 years ago

FWIW, it could be referring to the opcodes in the .NET virtual machine.

nkassis2• 15 years ago

If you're going to pick a fake identity would you pick one that would get you attention like this? Seems like a fake identity but not sure it's the best one.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

The best fake identity is a real one that everybody believes is fake.

famousactress2• 15 years ago

.. and one that everyone wants to be real.

pyre3• 15 years ago

Lightning rod... Red herring... take your pick of phrase.

pinguar• 15 years ago

This story reminds me Hit-Girl and Big Daddy from Kick-Ass movie.

Cococabasa• 15 years ago

I heard there is excessive camp in this movie, but I'll check it out.

btipling• 15 years ago

No, no there isn't. There is just awesomeness.

rue• 15 years ago

You could read the comic instead.

shareme• 15 years ago

Ways they track you:

1. Using same computer that connects via phone, wireless, etc and than using any email service. 2. Machine characteristics since they cannot get the machine ID they go for the next best digital finger print ..ie operator grammar/typos..cpu speed, ram size, etc. 3. Websites have visitor logs..the track back to you eventually gets fleshed out.

I think the Forbes article writer got played..

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Dad allegedly showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them. It was all harmless and Kayla had only been using the Internet to talk to friends on MSN. But she began looking into hacking, and learned scripting languages like Perl...

I've always known C was just a gateway to the dangerous stuff.

ewan• 15 years ago

Everywhere I've lived public service announcements say that "E" is the gateway to dangerous stuff

dr_• 15 years ago

If the government is going after these people it should be for one reason only - to hire them. Maybe with this kind of talent working together we could find out where rogues like OBL are hiding.

dexen• 15 years ago

Work offer for a hacker is sometimes feared to be just a bait of a trap. The trap is said to spring once the hacker admits taking part in the hack.

Compare http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245786

desigooner• 15 years ago

IRL, it's thought by many that AQ stopped using electronic communication to relay important messages and only rely on inperson communication / messengers.

nrkn2• 15 years ago

Using the quotes from the article, however too few words to analyze properly, so inconclusive, but still...

From http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

Genre: Informal Female = 171 Male = 182 Difference = 11; 51.55% Verdict: Weak MALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

From http://bookblog.net/gender/analysis.php

Female Score: 94 Male Score: 133

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Everything I write comes out as female and I'm... not. I wouldn't trust that (or maybe I should question my gender...)

sane_delirium• 15 years ago

It was pretty accurate for me, and I've used several examples.

jamesgeck0• 15 years ago

Perhaps you should use... fewer ellipses? There are several grammatical patterns females use more than males (and vice versa). I assume that's how the test works, anyway.

danielharan• 15 years ago

S/He's been hanging out with mostly male geeks, and would probably pick up their "accent". Also, raised by a single dad who's a programmer.

(Using a gender guesser is genius though)

bluehat• 15 years ago

I'm female last time I checked, and a paste from my blog makes gender guesser thinks I'm weak male and gender genie says I'm male. Doesn't mean anything, but worth noting.

Grepped this, which ars technica claims is a real chat log. She says just under 200 words on this log, and it comes up as weak male again on Gender Guesser and male on Gender Genie. Her username of `k is removed for the analysis. http://pastebin.com/x69Akp5L

Here's the article where Ars Technica links to that pastebin http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-secu...

nrkn2• 15 years ago

I ran a bunch of short stories through it too and it gave me plenty of weak male for female authors.

jacquesgt• 15 years ago

I ran the first answer from this interview with Barbara Liskov (famous MIT computer science professor) through the gender guesser: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10217055-92.html

Genre: Formal Female = 509 Male = 971 Difference = 462; 65.6% Verdict: MALE

Computing represents a pretty specialized topic, and most of the sample data with computing-related discussion will be from men. It would be pretty tough for any simple Bayesian analysis to account for this.

astrange• 15 years ago

> In December 2008, she wrought havoc on one of the most famous forums of all, 4chan’s notorious /b/ channel, finding and exploited an SQL injection bug on its content management system, hacking in and causing mayhem on the forum for a few hours.

I don't remember any such exploit. You could produce that image by posting a lot.

darksaga• 15 years ago

My bs meter was high for a number of reasons. This paragraph was the most notable:

"Meanwhile she refuses to be chained to her computer, limiting herself to a few hours a night online. She rarely visits online forums "they’re boring"and a few days a week takes a course in college to further her goal of being a teacher. She lives in an English-speaking country not the U.K.but won’t say more about it"

So the previous paragraph stated she was "memorizing Windows Opcodes and scouring source code for exploitable bugs", but then suddenly she only spends a few hours online? Not likely. Most hardcore hackers I know don't just drop off the radar. The hunt to break into systems is like a drug. I have yet to read about, or know any hacker who simply spends a few hours online a day. At the speed internet security moves, this person's knowledge would be useless inside of 6 months.

Also, how does this person maintain her expert hacker knowledge with a few cursory hours a day on the internet? Literally impossible. Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

My conclusion? A carefully crafted profile of an Anon personality. Although I have no doubt this person probably exists, it certainly is not a 16 year old girl, and a majority of the information in the article is total BS. When you apply some very basic logic, the story just falls apart.

kijinbear• 15 years ago

"A few hours" could be anything between 2 and 8-10 hours. When I was a teenager I'd get in front of the computer as soon as I got back from school and keep the computer on until I went to bed. That added up to ~6 hours a day on average. Anything more would be unrealistic for someone who needs to go to school every day.

Some of the other discrepancies, though, look more suspicious. The very notion that a security-conscious person who has just committed a federal crime would spill so much about his/her life in a random newspaper article reeks of BS.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

8-10 isn't something you "limit" yourself to. From the context of the sentence "a few hours" suggests 2-3.

davej• 15 years ago

> Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

I agree that the persona is bullshit and that 'she' is a probably a mid-to-late 20s male but...

Where does it say that she/he deletes wipes all her drives clean? It only says that (s)he wipes her web accounts. From reading the article, (s)he keeps her personal files/documents on a MicroSD card; quite a smart and disposable solution really.

Perhaps the personal files are encrypted also? It's interesting to imagine what other steps you could take to protect your privacy, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to do alternating sharding at the bits and bytes level over SSH with off-site storage (Half on MicroSD, half off-site), does any tool do something similar currently? You could even put a self-destruct timer on the offsite storage (if last_login > 5 days ago: format hard drive with 40-pass erase) or maybe a kill-switch containing sensitive informatoin (ala Wikileaks).

cakeface• 15 years ago

She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. "I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds," she says by e-mail.

dkasper• 15 years ago

Forbes is being trolled.

personalcompute• 15 years ago

I don't think they care. Forbes is full of yellow journalism and fake stories drive hits just as much as real stories.

calvinfroedge• 15 years ago

If this is true lol, it makes me feel small haha. Kudos to omg@ Kayla (if she exists lol) = D lol hehe rofl omg

david_shaw• 15 years ago

I'm not particularly close to this issue, but the sexism I'm seeing here is pretty astounding. If this were a 16 year old guy, no one would bat an eyelid. Seriously.

Look at Mafiaboy back in 2000 -- he took down Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. I'm not even sure that he was 16 yet (I don't have his age offhand).

Is this a crazy and possibly fake story? Of course. Does that mean that it can't be true? Not by a long shot.

I work in information security, and at 16 knew a hell of a lot about SQL injection, buffer overflows, cross site scripting and oodles of other vulnerability classes. This girl didn't work alone, but part of a hacker group -- to me, it seems totally feasible.

I'm not saying that we should take every word an anonymous "16 year old girl" says on the Internet as absolute fact, but discounting this attack because it seems like a girl couldn't pull it off seems sexist and wrong. Again, if this were some pimply-faced male high schooler, no one would bat an eye.

digitalvisions• 15 years ago

You bring up a great point - which is actually contradictory in the story. She said was hassled for being so young. I know a lot of hackers and most got started very young like you point out, and all were welcomed into the hacker community without any issues - female or not.

brazzy• 15 years ago

Nobody's saying that it can't be real because girls don't grok tech and 16-year-olds are stupid. They're saying it's unlikely to be realy because statistically, the number of 16-year-old girl hackers is very small (relative to 25-year-old male hackers), there's a huge history of fake personas in hacking (and especially around Anonymous), and a 16-year-old girl is a very useful persona to get attention.

aprrrr• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what sexism you mean specifically, but my skepticism has nothing to do with the specifics of the persona. Of course there are 16-year-old girl hackers. My wife once was one.

I doubt that the character is really a 16-year-old girl because she's telling Forbes she's a 16-year-old girl.

If 'k said he were a 16-year-old boy, I'd doubt he were a 16-year-old boy.

If 'k said she were a 33-year-old quant on Wall St., I'd doubt she were a 33-year-old quant. Etc.

I just seriously doubt that this character is giving any real identifiable information to Forbes.

samfax• 15 years ago

I think the reason people keep saying she is fake is because they don't want to believe someone so young is capable of doing what she did. I've spoken to her via email and she said she doesn't care what people think about her, shes going to do what she does regardless and she has my full support.

Maybe instead of asking questions about her here, you ask her like i did?

kayla@anonleaks.ch

If she really is who she said she is that's one smart kid!

bl4k• 15 years ago

so she goes to extraordinary lengths to coverup her online activity, but grants an interview to a national news outlet where she divulges a large part of her personal history?

obvious troll is obvious

Udo• 15 years ago

This is Anonymous we're talking about. Isn't "16 year old girl" a well-known colloquialism on 4chan, normally used to convey the stereotype of a middle-aged, balding geek still living in his parent's basement who likes to use fake online personas? Forbes got trolled in a monumental fashion.

socillion3• 15 years ago

It's a synonym for attention whore.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Whoever it is, they are a genius of deception. Check this out: http://pastebin.com/tSiQevxe

Kayla first asks for root password using two passwords that she already has but might not necessarily be the root one. She also already knows that remote root isn't allowed. This way:

1) She'd get the root password e-mailed to her if it wasn't one of those two. "No, it's not those, it's '<password>'."

2) She sets up her point of entry.

Great stuff.

pippy• 15 years ago

>By the time Kayla was 14 she could fully program C and x86 assembly.

FML, I have a CS degree and still can't program ASM.

defroost• 15 years ago

Soon you are not going to know if anyone that you interact with online is who they say they are. The Pentagon has awarded a contract to a Silicon Valley company to develop software that creates fake personas that can then influence the "conversation" by spreading US propaganda. Each operator will be able to create up to 10 "personas". A friend just sent me a link about the Pentagon's decidedly Orwellian "sock puppet" software:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...

Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

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