U.S. Chamber joins Bank of America in Denying Ties to Disinformation Campaigns
source: http://ThinkProgress.org
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By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY
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CAPTIONBy Ian Murphy Photography
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- like the Bank of America -- is scrambling to distance itself from a cache of stolen e-mails that continue to disgorge stunning details of how high-stakes, corporate-backed disinformation campaigns get birthed.
The chamber and BofA are embroiled in mirror-image controversies stemming directly from the spontaneous hack last Sunday of HBGary Federal, a digital intelligence firm. The hack was pulled off by the elite global hacking group known as Anonymous.
That's not all. More e-mails swiped during that hack are very likely to be released publicly in the next few days, says Gregg Housh, a well-known activist and close observer of Anonymous.
For more on what stirred Anonymous to hack into HBGary Federal, and specifically target its CEO Aaron Barr, see our post from earlier today.
Housh emphasized that he does not participate in Anonymous' attacks, nor is he a spokesman for the hacking group, which may be best known for seeking revenge on corporations that attempted to cripple WikiLeaks.
But Housh regularly hangs around public Internet Relay Chat rooms where Anonymous members are known to congregate. He was in such a chat room with about 100 others last weekend when the HBGary hack was hatched. So he had a ring side seat.
Housh says a 16- year-old girl who part of a team of five elite hackers that conducted the hack played a pivotal role. She tricked a systems administrator into giving her access deep inside the company's network by persuading the admin into letting her use a temporary password: changeme123.
The team then swooped in to quickly deface the company's website and destroy data and applications, including wiping out back-up programs. They broke into the company's Google Enterprise cloud-based e-mail service and spent several hours downloading e-mail from Barr and five other senior employees. The entire hack took about eight or nine hours, with most of that time spent downloading emails, estimates Housh.
About 50,000 of Barr's e-mails very quickly got released on the Internet. But roughly 27,000 e-mails from the account of HBGary co-founder Greg Hoglund were held in reserve.
Anonymous group members who did not participate in the hack, along with a handful of reporters, began poring through Barr's email. On Wednesday, Feb. 9, Steve Ragan, Security Editor for The Tech Herald, published this story tying Bank of America to a campaign to muzzle WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
And on Thursday, Feb. 10, Lee Fang, a reporter for ThinkProgress.org, published this story tying the U.S. Chamber to preparations for a $2 million dirty-tricks campaign to undermine non-profit and labor groups who oppose the chamber's lobbying missions on behalf of large corporations.
Barr's e-mails contained details of plans to create faked personas to try to infiltrate such groups. One tactic discussed was how to entice opponent groups to go public with the bogus documents smearing the chamber, then exposing the documents as erroneous.
Even more worrisome were plans to harvest and circulate sensitive and unflattering information about spouses and children of progressive group leaders, says ThinkProgress reporter Scott Keyes.
In a Feb. 3 e-mail received by Barr, the sender grouses about not being able to collect an anticipated fee for preparing a preliminary plan. However the sender optimistically points to a Feb. 14 meeting at which he expects a deal to be nailed down under which the Chamber would pay $250,000 to $300,000 per month for "services and license fees."
"It's important to note that the smears and disinformation plans only saw the light of day because these e-mails were leaked," says Keyes. "Otherwise all this stuff very likely would have ended up in the mainstream dialogue, without people realizing that this was a smear plot deliberately hatched by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."
The e-mail revelations may not be over. Housh says Anonymous members late Friday were pushing ahead with plans to begin releasing Hoglund's e-mails -- on a user-friendly web page.
"So now they're working on a searchable, web-based interface that allows anyone to go through and categorize 27,000 more pieces of e-mail," says Housh. "They're saying very clearly that some of this next stuff to come out is worse. We'll see."
GO TO STORY:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/02/us-chamber-j...
Comment
15Recommend
CAPTIONBy Ian Murphy Photography
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- like the Bank of America -- is scrambling to distance itself from a cache of stolen e-mails that continue to disgorge stunning details of how high-stakes, corporate-backed disinformation campaigns get birthed.
The chamber and BofA are embroiled in mirror-image controversies stemming directly from the spontaneous hack last Sunday of HBGary Federal, a digital intelligence firm. The hack was pulled off by the elite global hacking group known as Anonymous.
That's not all. More e-mails swiped during that hack are very likely to be released publicly in the next few days, says Gregg Housh, a well-known activist and close observer of Anonymous.
For more on what stirred Anonymous to hack into HBGary Federal, and specifically target its CEO Aaron Barr, see our post from earlier today.
Housh emphasized that he does not participate in Anonymous' attacks, nor is he a spokesman for the hacking group, which may be best known for seeking revenge on corporations that attempted to cripple WikiLeaks.
But Housh regularly hangs around public Internet Relay Chat rooms where Anonymous members are known to congregate. He was in such a chat room with about 100 others last weekend when the HBGary hack was hatched. So he had a ring side seat.
Housh says a 16- year-old girl who part of a team of five elite hackers that conducted the hack played a pivotal role. She tricked a systems administrator into giving her access deep inside the company's network by persuading the admin into letting her use a temporary password: changeme123.
The team then swooped in to quickly deface the company's website and destroy data and applications, including wiping out back-up programs. They broke into the company's Google Enterprise cloud-based e-mail service and spent several hours downloading e-mail from Barr and five other senior employees. The entire hack took about eight or nine hours, with most of that time spent downloading emails, estimates Housh.
About 50,000 of Barr's e-mails very quickly got released on the Internet. But roughly 27,000 e-mails from the account of HBGary co-founder Greg Hoglund were held in reserve.
Anonymous group members who did not participate in the hack, along with a handful of reporters, began poring through Barr's email. On Wednesday, Feb. 9, Steve Ragan, Security Editor for The Tech Herald, published this story tying Bank of America to a campaign to muzzle WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
And on Thursday, Feb. 10, Lee Fang, a reporter for ThinkProgress.org, published this story tying the U.S. Chamber to preparations for a $2 million dirty-tricks campaign to undermine non-profit and labor groups who oppose the chamber's lobbying missions on behalf of large corporations.
Barr's e-mails contained details of plans to create faked personas to try to infiltrate such groups. One tactic discussed was how to entice opponent groups to go public with the bogus documents smearing the chamber, then exposing the documents as erroneous.
Even more worrisome were plans to harvest and circulate sensitive and unflattering information about spouses and children of progressive group leaders, says ThinkProgress reporter Scott Keyes.
In a Feb. 3 e-mail received by Barr, the sender grouses about not being able to collect an anticipated fee for preparing a preliminary plan. However the sender optimistically points to a Feb. 14 meeting at which he expects a deal to be nailed down under which the Chamber would pay $250,000 to $300,000 per month for "services and license fees."
"It's important to note that the smears and disinformation plans only saw the light of day because these e-mails were leaked," says Keyes. "Otherwise all this stuff very likely would have ended up in the mainstream dialogue, without people realizing that this was a smear plot deliberately hatched by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce."
The e-mail revelations may not be over. Housh says Anonymous members late Friday were pushing ahead with plans to begin releasing Hoglund's e-mails -- on a user-friendly web page.
"So now they're working on a searchable, web-based interface that allows anyone to go through and categorize 27,000 more pieces of e-mail," says Housh. "They're saying very clearly that some of this next stuff to come out is worse. We'll see."
GO TO STORY:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/02/us-chamber-j...
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