Arrogance is its own brand of stupidity. See this post from Matt Osborne at C&L. Aaron Barr is the CEO of HBGary Federal, one of the outfits retained, in a fully plausibly deniable manner, by Bank of America to trash those who were, it thought, about to unmask possibly criminal activities by its upper echelons. It didn't quite work out that way:
HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.
When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.
It gets worse -- a study in incompetence. This is the cherry on top:
Alas, two HBGary Federal employees—CEO Aaron Barr and COO Ted Vera—used passwords that were very simple; each was just six lower case letters and two numbers. Such simple combinations are likely to be found in any respectable rainbow table, and so it was that their passwords were trivially compromised.
This is a firm that specializes in Internet security.
Barr also completely misread the nature of Anonymous. Do follow the links -- there's some very interesting information there.
It would seem that the oligarchs' idea that they are above mere right and wrong has unintended consequences.
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