What the Sabu revelation means for hackers

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/sabu-fbi-hackers-informant

by gerryg • 14 years ago

31 16 14 years ago

fein• 14 years ago

An entire article and they didn't mention the most important point: All of the "hacking" done by Sabu and his cronies were small potatoes.

If you're going to delve into the world of blackhattery, then don't tell everyone like you're the newage digital messiah. How hard is this to understand? Who in their right mind would create an online identity to incriminate themselves?

I'm of the opinion/ belief that those who do actual malicious hacking aren't a load of egotistical attention whores, hence why it never makes the news.

aGHz• 14 years ago

This. While reading the article, I couldn't help but imagine the legions of extremely bright Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, etc hackers, most likely orders of magnitude more sophisticated than Sabu, looking at the LulzSec shenanigans with disdain and comparing our western hacking scene with Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight.

That being said, LulzSec et. al. were more about social activism than about accomplished hacking. For a mission like that you really need some mainstream appeal, and for that purpose the newage digital messiah fit the bill.

methoddk• 14 years ago

It fit the bill but at what cost? This fool still walks free for cooperating and selling out his peers? I can't believe this guy actually has a twitter account with 30k followers. Since when has hacking become about being in the public eye? I get the activism of it all, but they went about it horribly from the beginning.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

I was far from a fan of the lulzsec or antisec activities, but it's impossible to claim that the HB Gary hack didn't have a major impact on the security world. It's tempting for those in the business to dismiss hacks if they're not done with cutting edge techniques, but what really matters is the result not if a sql injection was used.

Tyrannosaurs• 14 years ago

Turns out that he's not the digital messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

victork2• 14 years ago

Totally agree. I mean just look at the whole Anonymous thing: "Hackers" want to feel that they are badasses, feared, they want their internet fame. Professional Blackhat? They just want (your) money!

To make a reference to a movie everytime these stories remind me of Scarface. The real and quiet blackhats are the silent columbian drug dealers. LulzSec/ Anonymous are the scarface of hacking. They succeed for a time, they are noisy and they use merchandise shipped by bigger crooks than they are. And guess who get killed in the end or put in jail while the other are piling money?

funkah• 14 years ago

The interesting thing is going back and looking at the posts (linked in TFA) of people who knew at the time who he was, and that he got flipped. Those are the people who actually know what they're doing and probably won't ever get caught, or at least will be much harder to catch. Those people are probably fine with Sabu being used as an example of what a "hacker" is.

Here's an interesting one. https://th3j35t3r.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/if-i-am-wrong-ill...

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

Jester won't get caught because he's pro-government. He attacks Wikileaks, the AnonOps servers, and a bunch of other people that the FBI doesn't give two shits about protecting. I suspect if he was of a different disposition, he'd be no less likely to get v& than anyone else.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

I think the wikileaks theory has some real merit, it leapt to my mind immediately when I heard sabu was working as a CI. Around the time of the HB Gary hack I remember reading somewhere that wikileaks had a no documents sourced from hacks policy, and this was why anonleaks.ch was set up because wikileaks wouldn't take the emails. Presumably this would be due to a desire to avoid criminal exposure, though I'm not sure how that would legally differ from other sources of leaks. I spent a little time googling for a reference to this when I read the news about sabu but came up blank, does anyone know about any (historic) policies like that?

nikcub• 14 years ago

I thought it was because Wikileaks were going to be slow with getting the info up. Although they may have hesitated because the HBGary emails may not have met a 'public interest' requirement (see the Pentagon Papers case)

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

Wikileaks' first forays with Anon were in publishing the information pulled off the Scientology servers way back in the Chanology days. I doubt they had a "no hacks" policy, or if they did then it was only implemented later.

It'll be interesting to see whether or not the legally and morally ambiguous nature of the directions given to Sabu by the FBI will in any way prejudice any evidence they may have gained against Assange.

driverdan• 14 years ago

The outcome of this will be interesting to see. A CI running a group like this isn't unheard of, that's not the issue. The issue is how he clearly organized and promoted crimes. IANAL but based on my experience working on both sides of the law I can see what he did crossing the line of what LE is allowed to do and having other cases thrown out because of it.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Indeed. It'll be interesting to find out what ops he organized after becoming a ci. Any defense lawyer would make a strong case of entrapment for those situations.

dsplittgerber2• 14 years ago

This article consists of a lot of baseless speculations and conjecture.

Under German law e.g. there is a clear difference for an agent provocateur to directly incite specific felonies ("we have to hack company x by doing y") compared to just generally staying 'within cover' by proclaiming generic plans ("let's harm bad companies"). I don't know about US law, but so far I have not seen evidence of him behaving in the former and not the latter way. FBI would have to have been really stupid to not have instructed him quite specifiy on this issue, and law enforcement is generally not stupid, especially in high profile cases. So don't count on entrapment.

Also, who has ever seen evidence that sabu - and by extension the FBI - has ever actually 'hacked' after being turned? To the contrary, the only logs I have ever seen (within indictment), indicate (as far as I can remember) that it was anarchos who did the actual hacking of StratFor. According to the conversatiom logs between sabu and anarchos I have read it seems as if anarchos kept other members of Anon/antisec mostly in the dark as to the details of the operation. On currently publicly available information, anarchos seeme to have done the actual 'hacking' on his own and only needed help (ftp'ing data sets for backup) afterwards. Also note that the FBI server was not the only server the data was transferred to. But providing a server to save evidence and to generally support (but not incite) a crime fits much better with the legal framework for agent provocateurs.

Also, one has to remember the general model of how anon operates - it, if by chance, resembles a need-to-know basis similar to military or intelligence operations. Do not assume their 'leader' knew exactly what any one 'member' (of what? Anon is by defintion not a specifiable group, even sub-groups are constantly changing) was specifically up to at any moment.

It's also not very insightful to blindly trust the FBI assertion that sabu was caught because he logged onto IRC just once (!) without a proxy. Given that he was always operating with proxies, bouncers and under TOR, and also given that he was publicly 'doxed' wrongly beforehand (but also correctly (!) before being visited by the FBI), why would a single unprotected login lead the FBI to actually following up on the IP and paying the 'IP address a visit', so to speak. It's possible, sure, but is it probable? For me, another possibility is more probable: sabu was a bit too forthcoming with personal, identifiable information when on IRC and chatting with people he assumed to know. Is it only a nice coincidence that laurelai, another member of anon, was visited by the FBI in the months before sabu was turned? Laurelai has admitted to the visit and even to talking to the FBI for hours, but has maintained to not habe snitched. Believable? I don't know - but it's at least more probable as to why they got to sabu. It's also standard operating procedure for the FBI to rely on several informants to get to the big guys. They very often go forthe - more reliable - human intel instead of 'internet logs'.

There is a bunch of other stuff which doesn't add up, but probably no one cares. This is why I don't read newspapers anymore. I can make up baseless conjecture and end up misinformed all by myself, thank you very much.

dsplittgerber2• 14 years ago

One other thing: It can be read on several pastebins that once anon/antisec had secured access to the StratFor data, sabu unsuccessfully tried to get Wikileaks to pay for the data. Which didn't happen of course. The incident also made him seem highly suspect to other members of anon/antisec as that clearly violated their M.O. Which to me, all seems as if the FBI accidentally stumbled unto a chance to try to stick severe charges against Wikileaks (which they have been trying to prosecute for willfully cooperating with the enemy all along) and blowing it. Still, they will have gained interesting insights into how submissions to WL work now and perhaps, to everyone's surprise, they succeeded in getting to Assange somehow.

What the Sabu revelation means for hackers

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