WikiLeaks founder charged with conspiring with Anonymous and LulzSec hackers

[ghost]

WikiLeaks founder charged with conspiring with Anonymous and LulzSec hackers

US Department of Justice claims Assange tried to recruit hackers to commit crimes on his behalf. One of the hackers was an FBI informant, said the FBI.

 

The US Department of Justice has filed today a superseding indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

 

"The new indictment [PDF] does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019," the DOJ said in a press release.

 

Instead, the newly updated indictment clarifies the depth of Assange's alleged crimes by broadening the original charges to include more serious accusations that the WikiLeaks founder conspired and tried to recruit Anonymous and LulzSec hacker to carry out hacking on his behalf.

 

"In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and PDFs.

 

"In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times.

 

"WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an 'Anonymous' and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again.

 

These broadened charges come to add to previous accusations that Assange conspired with Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash for an Army computer in order to obtain classified material, which he later published on the WikiLeaks portal.

 

Assange has been under arrest in the UK since April 2019 when London authorities had taken the WikiLeaks founder under custody for breaking bail conditions. On the same day, the US also filed charges and an extradition request. US authorities updated the indictment in May 2019, and again today.

 

Several journalists have criticized the US for prosecuting Assange, claiming he was merely reporting on leaked documents and was entitled to First Amendment protection.

 

Through the superseding indictment unsealed today, the DOJ is trying to clarify that the charges are for more than just reporting and publishing leaked material, but for getting hands-on involved with obtaining the hacked data, actions for which free press protections don't apply.

 

ZDnet

[steven36]

Yes they all snitches Sabu  (Hector Monsegur ) ratted them all out  and then  they talked as well. Who says crime don't pay . Assange was in the wrong line of work ,  most all the hackers  from back then  have  good paying jobs in Cyber Security .Were was he?  hold up in a embassy for years  for being a trouble maker . Just like Snowdon he lost everything for what he done  . Trying  to be a hero doesn't  pay because a hero is nothing but a sandwich. then your soon forgot about just like the guys that told on government before are now  forgotten .  the past just keeps repeating itself  and never  ever stops it from happening  because people  forget in 10  years or so what happen before.  I was online in  2011 watching  it go down  they would hack the government and say 0 down on social  media .

[steven36]

 

 

For 50 days during the summer of 2011, the members of Lulz Security were the most famous hackers on the planet. A splinter group of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, LulzSec tore up Fox News Fox Broadcasting, crashed the CIA's website and leaked hundreds of thousands of Sony customers' passwords, boasting of each new hack on their entertaining Twitter account.

 

During the height of their exploits, journalist Parmy Olson had an inside track with LulzSec's key players, including Topiary, the group's quick-witted spokesman, and Sabu, the de facto LulzSec leader-turned FBI informant who helped bring the crew down. Olson's new book,We Are Anonymous, tells the fascinating story of LulzSec's rise and fall.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

Revered Anonymous Mastermind Rats Out His Pals to the FBI

The most prominent and revered member of Anonymous, Sabu, has reportedly been an FBI informant for…

 

One of the more intriguing episodes in LulzSec's brief run was when Wikileaks founder Julian Assange apparently tried to enlist them to hack his enemies. The following excerpt from We Are Anonymous details a previously undisclosed online meeting that took place in July 2011 between LulzSec hackers and a Wikileaks representative* named "q." —Ed

 

For Assange, a simple DDoS attack on CIA.gov was some much needed comic relief. Since Anonymous had leaped to his defense in December, he had spent the last few months fighting the threat of extradition to the United States and accusations of treason over WikiLeaks's release of diplomatic cables. Swedish authorities had doubled his problems by charging him with attempted rape, which meant he was now fighting extradition to Sweden too. In the meantime, he was staying in the countryside manor of an English journalist, wearing an electronic tag and trying to keep up with developments in the world of cyber security. It had been hard not to notice LulzSec. On the one hand, the group looked like fearless comedians.

 

On the other, it clearly had skilled hackers on the team.

 

Impressed and perhaps unable to help himself, Assange had opened the main WikiLeaks Twitter account and posted to its nearly one million followers: "WikiLeaks supporters, LulzSec, take down CIA . . . who has a task force into WikiLeaks," adding: "CIA finally learns the real meaning of WTF." Soon after a few news agencies and websites reported that WikiLeaks was supporting LulzSec, he deleted the first tweet. He didn't want to be publicly associated with what were clearly black hat hackers. Instead, he decided it was time to quietly reach out to the audacious new group that was grabbing the spotlight. On June 16, the day after Ryan set his botnet on CIA.gov, an associate of WikiLeaks contacted [LulzSec spokesman] Topiary.

 

"I've got a contact in WikiLeaks that wants to talk to you," the person said, then directed him to a new IRC server that could serve as neutral ground for a private discussion. The network was irc.shakebaby.net and the channel was #wikilulz. Topiary was immediately skeptical and believed the contact was trolling him.

 

When he finally spoke to a WikiLeaks staff member known as q, who was in the channel under the nickname Dancing_Balls, he asked for someone to post something from the WikiLeaks Twitter account. Assange, who allegedly had sole access, did so, putting out something about eBay, then deleting the post. Topiary did the same from the LulzSec Twitter feed. But he needed more proof, since the WikiLeaks feed could have been hacked. q said he could do that. Within five minutes, he pasted a link to YouTube into the IRC chat, and he said to look at it quickly.

 

Topiary opened it and saw video footage of a laptop screen and the same IRC chat they were having, with the text moving up in real time. The camera then panned up to show a snowy-haired Julian Assange sitting directly opposite and staring into a white laptop, chin resting thoughtfully in his hand. He wore a crisp white shirt and sunlight streamed through a window bordered with fancy curtains. q deleted the twenty-two-second video moments later. Also in the IRC channel with Topiary and q was [LulzSec leader] Sabu, now likely with very interested FBI agents monitoring the discussion.

 

"Tell Assange I said ‘hello,' " Sabu told q.

 

"He says ‘hi' back," q said.

 

At first Topiary was nervous. Here was Julian Assange himself, the founder of WikiLeaks, reaching out to his team. He couldn't think why he wanted to talk to them. Then he noticed what q and Assange were saying. They were praising LulzSec for its work, adding that they had laughed at the DDoS attack on the CIA.

 

With all the flattery, it almost felt like they were nervous. For a split second, LulzSec seemed to be much bigger than Topiary had ever thought.

 

By now a few others from the core team knew about what was happening and had come into the chat room. Sabu had given them a quick rundown of what was going on, then said it could mean hitting bigger targets.

 

"My crew seems up for taking out traditional government sites," he told Assange and q in the chat. "But seeing as that video was removed, some of them are skeptical."

 

"Yes I removed the video since it was only for you, but I can record a new one if you want :)," q said.

 

"If we need additional trust (mainly my crew) then ok," said Sabu. "But right now we seem good."

 

Then q went on to explain why he and Assange had contacted LulzSec: they wanted help infiltrating several Icelandic corporate and government sites. They had many reasons for wanting retribution.

 

A young WikiLeaks member had recently gone to Iceland and been arrested. WikiLeaks had also been bidding for access to a data center in an underground bunker but had lost out to another corporate bidder after the government denied them the space. Another journalist who supported WikiLeaks was being held by authorities. Assange and q appeared to want LulzSec to try and grab the e-mail service of government sites, then look for evidence of corruption or at least evidence that the government was unfairly targeting WikiLeaks. The picture they were trying to paint was of the Icelandic government trying to suppress WikiLeaks's freedom to spread information. If they could leak such evidence, they explained, it could help instigate an uprising of sorts in Iceland and beyond.

 

The following day, q and Assange wanted to talk to LulzSec again. Perhaps sensing that Topiary was still skeptical, q insisted on uploading another video. It again showed his laptop screen and the IRC chat they were having being updated in real time, then a close-up of Assange himself, head in hand again, but this time blinking and moving the track pad on his laptop, then him talking to a woman next to him. The camera was then walked around Assange before the video ended. The video had been filmed and uploaded in less than five minutes. Topiary, who was experienced with Photoshop and image manipulation, calculated that doctoring the IRC chat and Assange in the same video image within such a short space of time would have been incredibly difficult, and he veered toward believing this was all real.

 

But q was not asking LulzSec to be hit men out of the goodness of their hearts. There was potential for mutual gain. q was offering to give the group a spreadsheet of classified government data, a file called RSA 128, which was carefully encrypted and needed cracking. q didn't send it over, but he described the contents.

 

"That's pretty heavy stuff to crack," Sabu told q. "Have you guys tried simple bruteforce?" q explained they had had computers at MIT working on the file for two weeks with no success.

Topiary wanted to ask if Assange was going to give the team other things to leak, but he decided not to. Part of him didn't want to know the answer to that. It was already starting to look like LulzSec was on the road to becoming a black-hat version of WikiLeaks. If WikiLeaks was sitting on a pile of classified data that was simply too risky to leak, then it now had a darker, edgier cousin to leak it through.

 

Topiary decided to mention that LulzSec had been the same team behind the HBGary attack. Assange said he had been impressed with the HBGary fallout but added, "You could have done it better. You could have gone through all the e-mails first."

 

"We could have," Topiary conceded, "but we're not a leaks group. We just wanted to put it out as fast as possible."

 

"Yes but you could have released it in a more structured way," Assange said.

 

"We didn't want to go through 75,000 e-mails looking for corruption," Topiary countered again. He remembered how he had trawled through those e-mails looking not for scandal but for Penny Leavy's love letter to Greg Hoglund and for Barr's World of Warcraft character.

 

The team decided to invite Assange and q over to their IRC network on Sabu's server. Topiary created a channel for them all to talk in and called it #IceLulz. q said he wished WikiLeaks could help the group more with things like servers or even advice, but they didn't want to link the organization too obviously to LulzSec. In fact, when Topiary told q to go ahead and send the RSA 128 file over any time, q seemed to back off.

 

"Yeah, maybe in the future we'll see how this goes," q said. He never did send the file, at least not to Topiary.

 

Still, Sabu was "the most excited he had ever been," Topiary later remembered, over the moon that WikiLeaks was asking for his help. It is unclear if Sabu was in reality haunted by the fact that he was now also helping to implicate Assange. Six months prior, he had believed so passionately in the WikiLeaks cause that he was willing to risk bringing his hacker name out into the public for the first time in nine years. Another possibility: the FBI was encouraging Sabu to reach out to Assange to help gather evidence on one of the most notorious offenders of classified government data in recent times. It seems probable that if Sabu had helped, for instance, extradite Assange to the United States, it would have improved his settlement dramatically.

 

"It's our greatest moment," Sabu told the crew. He and q started talking in more depth about various websites, and then Sabu sent links to two government websites and a company to the rest of the team, tasking them with finding a way to get into their networks and grab e-mails. Over the next few days, Topiary passed the job of staying in contact with WikiLeaks to Sabu, and for the next few weeks, Assange visited LulzSec's chat network four or five more times.

 

Topiary left the #IceLulz IRC channel open on his laptop and kept it open. Pretty soon, though, it became just another one of the thirty other channels demanding his attention, another page of flashing red text.

 

*A caveat: This being the shadowy world of hackers, it's impossible to say with certainty who LulzSec spoke with at the time. In her book, Olson points out that q is a controversial figure; some claim he's a rogue agent impersonating a Wikileaks insider, while others assert he's a true member of Assange's inner circle. If Assange did try to solicit hacks from LulzSec it could prove legally damning, but authorities will have a hard time proving it.)

 

BY: Parmy Olson   the London Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine.  via  Gawker

 

Excerpted from We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson.

 

Source Gawker

 

 

[Edion Gecos]

The whole trial against Julian Assange is such a farce and a slap in the face of journalism and democracy and the way of his treatment over the past several years (already in the Ecuadorian Embassy, but much more intensified now in solitary confinement in prison) amounts to torture and abuse as was confirmed by the UN inspector for human rights who visited him.  

The powers that be in the US - and their cowardly allies in the UK and elsewhere - simply don't want the public to know about their war atrocities in Afghanistan and Irak, spying on their own citicens, systematically lied about it not only to the public but also to Congress, and the blatant rigging of the Democratic Primary election for Hillary against Bernie in 2016 - all things that got exposed by Wikileaks. 

 

"WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach" ... as did the New York Times or Washington Post and others - that's the job of responsible journalist (of which there sadly are so few left in the US nowadays).

They try to throw everything but the kitchen sink against Julian Assange to see what sticks - and the sink will come flying as well sooner or later, out of desperation.

And by the way, doing the right thing in itself is good and will make you a hero. Neither Snowden, Manning, or Assange woke up one day and said "I want to be a hero, how best can I achieve that?"

No, they saw corruption and injustice and stood up against all odds - that'S why they are and remain heroes for millions of others. They will be remembered, just like Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers about US war atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and others are still remembered and praised today, almost 40 years later!  

We all should take a leaf out of their book and keep up our own courage, speaking out against abusive power instead of being silenced. 

[steven36]

44 minutes ago, Edion Gecos said:

And by the way, doing the right thing in itself is good and will make you a hero. Neither Snowden, Manning, or Assange woke up one day and said "I want to be a hero, how best can I achieve that?"

No body knows who they was now expect  for people who was obsessed with Snowden . They even passed  a law back then  that the NSA could never do it again then it the law never seen the light of day, another spy bill was put  in it's place   it never goes away they just change the name now its called the freedom act  the NSA been around for over a 100 years under different names . If people had not forgotten or even cared what Snowden  did would never been needed to be done because it wouldn't keep happening and it's  happening right now again they  spying  on the protesters as we speak like  it's  the 60s all over again.

 

Words with out actions are meaningless   just like a privacy you never had to began with  , you don't have a right to privacy in Public you  never did   you know why  the NSA  has all that info  Snowden reported on   because people was stupid enough  to do it in public on the internet ,  It's the public domain  that was totally different than the  60s were  they was spying  on people in there own homes . The Government is never going to stop spying on people in public because its not a private place  but when they cross the line is when they spy on you in private  and even when they do get caught at it they just get pardon and they keep doing it.

[Edion Gecos]

26 minutes ago, steven36 said:

[...] If people had not forgotten or even cared what Snowden did would never been needed to be done because it wouldn't keep happening and it's  happening right now again they spying on the protesters as we speak like it's the 60s all over again.

 

Words with out actions are meaningless [...]

You are right that words without actions are meaningless - that's what we see in Congress every day when people like Pelosi and Schumer feign outrage against what Trump tweeted or what "the most dangerous government ever" did, but then happily pass bills to raise the military budged and tax cuts/bail outs for the super rich while millions of poor and middle class people lose their jobs and health care. Or they "take a knee in solidarity" while writing the crime bill that kills people of color in the first place. Most politicians are all words and no action.

The action has to come from ordinary people who demand their rights of justice, freedom, and also privacy - like the massive protests we continue to see in the streets.

 

Of course the NSA, FBI, CIA and every other acronym, corrupt politician, and their oligarchic overlords who pay them, try to cover up and appease by lip-service when they have been exposed while continuing their dark deeds in the background. That's why we never relent, give up the struggle, and be silent about the abuse of power. And that's why we need heroes like Snowden, Manning, and Assange who enable us to get a glimpse of the dirt behind the shiny facade. and who encourage us with their action to act as well.

 

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

[steven36]

30 minutes ago, Edion Gecos said:

 

Of course the NSA, FBI, CIA and every other acronym, corrupt politician, and their oligarchic overlords who pay them, try to cover up and appease by lip-service when they have been exposed while continuing their dark deeds in the background. That's why we never relent, give up the struggle, and be silent about the abuse of power. And that's why we need heroes like Snowden, Manning, and Assange who enable us to get a glimpse of the dirt behind the shiny facade. and who encourage us with their action to act as well.

Only what you  say  would matter if people were not sheep  to there governments  when something bad happens at home  like Vietnam  for instance  it easy to to protest about something on the other side of the world  , but once  the shit hits the fan   like 911 privacy  went out the window and people turn a blind  eye  to what the government was doing  we already knew they was doing it.

 

Most people  wanted  it to be that way ,just like the Corina Virus  people did what there government said except for a few protesters. People are sheep baaaah, 

 

Vietnam never happen on US soil so people protested  it but  911  people wanted  to be protected and if they government didn't step in   millions would of  died  at home . The reason they made the patriot act was because  the terrorist knocked down the world trade towers and killed people  no one cares about privacy when war and  virus breaks out .

[Edion Gecos]

Right, most people are sheep - not only to their governments, but also to monopolist (software) companies, or mass media -  following the provided narrative/tool/bandwagon as it is more comfortable to stay within their cushy comfort-zone instead of critically thinking on their own.

And too many fall into the purposeful trap of division and fear-mongering (of "terrorism", "immigrants", "those conservative fascists on the right", "those anarchist rioters on the left", "those [Others than YOU"). But I think more and more people now are waking up as the virus pandemic & economic downfall without any meaningful help by those in power has made millions more unemployed, go hungry and scramble for their livelihood - they simply have nothing more left to lose and being active - even if it is only within their immediate surrounding and local level politics - gives them their only fighting chance for meaningful change...

[steven36]

I like you man i really do because i think a lot like you  but i  live in the USA and i  even  lost a job  because of that fear  your talking about  when those towers fell in 2001 , You can always find another  job  when something bad happens really you want have a choice if you want to survive . We had a problem with  employment and things  in the USA every since they started making everything overseas.  People don't wake up to things there Government do to make things worse on us .  The people who profit off of it , the big companies have brain washed the public so they look to there  Government  to stop  it because these places cost you jobs  and many online invade your privacy .

 

But the government is just a wolf in sheep's clothing  that don't want you to have no privacy  ether  and they the ones that sign the laws that caused  the problems to begin with and  one side of the fence defends the fact they caused the problems  and the other side complain about it , but  at the end of the day people are just Sheep.

 

And every  so many years the side of the fence changes form right to left  and then to left to right but things never got better very long at lest in my life time they haven't . I don't care  what side you belong too as long as you can make the world  a better place . I'm not right are left I'm independent  and free   .

[ghost]

DOJ's New WikiLeaks Indictment Has Significant, Convenient Plot Holes

Demonstrators sporting Guy Fawkes masks take part in a protest called by Catalan National Assembly (ANC) under the motto “Journalism is not a crime” to support WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Barcelona on February 24, 2020. Photo: Lluis Gene (Getty)

 

In its push to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K., the U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday published a superseding indictment aimed at broadening “the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” The names of certain organizations and individuals are masked, including that of a paid FBI informant who stole money from WikiLeaks and later confessed to having sex with nine underage boys in exchange for money and other valuables.

 

A decent chunk of the filing relates to Chelsea Manning, her interactions with Assange and other possible ties to known WikiLeaks associates, which serve as the foundation for the bulk of the charges against Assange, including multiple counts of espionage.

 

But in hopes of linking Assange to other “unlawful overt acts” as part of a broader conspiracy—one goal of which is connecting Assange to crimes against a NATO ally of the country considering his extradition—DOJ describes several alleged interactions between Assange and Anonymous hackers involved in major criminal operations. Considerable context is omitted from the descriptions of these events, however, including the FBI’s own role in furthering attacks by Anonymous against American businesses and foreign governments in South America and the Middle East, based on a review of sealed evidence by Gizmodo.

 

A section of the indictment titled “Sabu, Hammond, and ASSANGE” begins on the date December 25, 2011, and refers to an attack on servers belonging to a private firm identified only as “Intelligence Consulting Company.” This is obviously Stratfor, the Austin-based private intelligence company whose millions of pilfered emails comprise the WikiLeaks drop known as the Global Intelligence Files.

 

DOJ omits several crucial details about the Stratfor hack in its attempts to name Assange as a conspirator in a breach that happened without his knowledge. Most notably, prosecutors exclude that the actual breach of Stratfor’s security, in late 2011, occurred 83 days prior to the events they describe, unknownst by anyone DOJ identifies as part of the conspiracy, including Assange.

 

This has gone mostly unreported due to the fact that all of the evidence related to the hack was sealed by a federal judge in Manhattan. Attempts by the New York Times and other outlets to acquire the evidence in court all failed. Nevertheless, nearly all of it was leaked to a handful of reporters in 2013 and today form the basis of multiple detailed accounts of the hack and surrounding events. (A portion of the material has been publicly accessible for years.)

 

One key document is a confidential computer forensics report, completed in February 2012, describing the Stratfor breach. The report was completed by investigators working for Verizon, which Stratfor contracted about five days after the public became aware of the breach. It lays out several important facts: The first is that attempts to breach Stratfor’s email server began on September 29, 2011, and that four days later, a brute force attack against a specific user account was successful.

 

This break-in detailed in the confidential report occurred two months before anyone prosecutors have blamed for the attack even knew of the company’s existence.

 

On November 16, the data dump containing the credit card information of Stratfor customers was created. Notably, this predates the DOJ’s own timeline of Anonymous’ involvement by 19 days. That this is the actual credit card file ultimately leaked by Anonymous is indisputable: The dataset contains 79,062 credit cards, the exact number of cards held by Stratfor on November 16, according to the forensics report. By the time Anonymous published its list, Stratfor’s database contained an additional 1,860 cards, none of which were included in the leak.

 

The first Anonymous figure identified by DOJ as part of the Stratfor hack doesn’t become aware of the breach until early December, according to DOJ’s own timeline of events. In 2012, the FBI fed news reporters, including those at the New York Times, false information about how this all transpired. The FBI claimed that an Anonymous hacker found a way into Stratfor’s network on December 6 and then notified a member of his team—who happened to be an FBI informant.

 

In reality, the exact opposite happened.

 

Prosecutors have never mentioned, nor has the FBI ever acknowledged the capture of, the hacker actually responsible for breaching Stratfor and creating the stolen credit card file. The narrative has always been that Jeremy Hammond, a hacker affiliated with the Anonymous-offshoot Antisec, was chiefly responsible for the breach. (Hammond is currently serving the final year of his 10-year sentence for hacking Stratfor.)

 

For certain, Hammond gleefully ransacked Stratfor, defaced its website, encouraged others to commit fraud using its stolen credit cards, and on December 24, 2011, inputted the commands that disabled its web server and deleted its file systems. But prior to December 4, the date an FBI informant (“Sabu”) offered him the means to access those systems, Hammond had no apparent knowledge of the company’s existence.

 

Evidence collected by the FBI, which DOJ has fought to keep concealed, shows the hacker responsible for breaching Stratfor (known only as “Hyrriiya”) was closely tied with a group of hackers whose central focus was infiltrating the Syrian government—the same group behind the leak of the Syria Files, more than 2 million emails from Syrian government officials published by WikiLeaks in July 2012.

 

Moreover, the evidence appears to show a clear violation of DOJ’s guidelines for the use of confidential informants, which expressly forbid informants from initiating or instigating “a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state, or local offense.” Despite claiming in court that its informant was under constant surveillance and worked side-by-side with agents throughout his cooperation, an FBI official later said of any alleged unlawful conduct: “It’s not like we watched him every time he got up to get a coke.” (This also appears untrue as prosecutors claimed in 2014 there was a webcam in his apartment.)

 

In one of the most egregious examples of this violation, records show the informant providing Hammond complete credit card data belonging to a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and an employee of Raytheon as evidence the breach is authentic. Hammond responds that he’s interested and wants to “sink [his] teeth” into the target.

 

At the time Stratfor was hacked, companies rarely faced any scrutiny for suffering data breaches. Were the same hack to occur today, coverage of the event would likely be different. After Equifax announced its breach in 2017, the company was investigated federally and excoriated publicly, its reputation essentially torched. Stratfor, meanwhile, quietly paid out a meager $1.7 million settlement and was largely portrayed as a victim in the press.

 

In truth, Stratfor set the stage for its own devastating breach through its own sheer negligence. Its security, or lack thereof, was appalling, according to its own forensic report. The company had virtually no controls over remote access to its network, which was not protected by a firewall and lacked proper file integrity-monitoring. It had no password management policy. According to the report, staff “commonly use the same password to access email as the password to remotely access a system containing sensitive information.”

 

In 2011, Stratfor was, the report found, ignoring all routine data security standards established by the payment card industry: no firewall, no encryption, no regularly updated anti-virus software, no need-to-know restricted access, no network monitoring, no regular audits of its systems, and no existing policy to address information security. The server that held Stratfor’s unsecured credit card data wasn’t even segregating from its email server, which was the hackers’ point of entry and the only reason any financial information was stolen in the first place.

 

If the same hack were to have happened this year, the company would wind up eating the lion’s share of the blame.

 

Perhaps the most absurd twist is that Dallas-based journalist Barrett Brown ended up getting slapped with nearly $900,000 in restitution to Stratfor, even though Brown had no advanced knowledge of the attack and, to be blunt, couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag.

 

As with Hammond, Brown took a deal in an effort to avoid potentially decades in prison. But in trying to ensure Brown got the harshest sentence possible, federal prosecutors repeatedly painted him as being closely allied with the hackers behind the Stratfor breach. This despite the fact that DOJ quietly withheld evidence obtained by an informant obliterating that theory. This evidence showed that the hackers secretly loathed Brown and had even discussed implicating him in the crime—textbook Brady material, which would have all but upended the government’s account of Brown being integral to the breach.

 

As Gizmodo previously reported, there is likely ample evidence to show that WikiLeaks aided the Stratfor hackers in the wake of the attack, after the fact. But in several places, Gizmodo can confirm, the indictment attributes statements directly to Assange when, in reality, those conversations were relayed second-hand. (Assange is also known for using a variety of methods to obscure his identity online including, notoriously, referring to himself in the third-person.) At best, these are copies of exchanges taken from chat rooms in which a user claims to be Assange, which is not likely to hold up in court.

 

The evidence does show that someone alleging to be Assange provided the Stratfor hackers with a script designed to help them more easily navigate the more than 5 million emails they stole (though, as the FBI’s own evidence shows, the hackers determined it practically useless.) Nevertheless, like Brown, the evidence also shows Assange had no foreknowledge of the attack. Without WikiLeaks’ involvement, Stratfor’s customers would have still suffered the same amount of financial harm, the company’s systems would have still been destroyed, and its emails would have ended up splattered across the internet anyway, in one form or another.

 

Regardless of whatever alleged crimes Assange may actually be guilty of—if any—that shouldn’t distract from the fact that DOJ’s timeline of events is woefully misleading. The agency’s handling of the Stratfor breach should not be cast as a model for how to prosecute computer crimes. It is at best a paradigm for evidence mismanagement, and at worst, a glaring case of deliberate prosecutorial misconduct.

 

Gizmodo

[steven36]

It just depends

5 hours ago, ghost said:

Regardless of whatever alleged crimes Assange may actually be guilty of—if any—that shouldn’t distract from the fact that DOJ’s timeline of events is woefully misleading. The agency’s handling of the Stratfor breach should not be cast as a model for how to prosecute computer crimes. It is at best a paradigm for evidence mismanagement, and at worst, a glaring case of deliberate prosecutorial misconduct.

Like the UK  cares  hes a political prisoner and they just waiting on him to die anybody else wold done been out of jail  for jumping bail  , The DOJ  only done the paperwork. Hes in there because he knows too much on the 1%  and the  U.S military had him put in jail  hes a threat to  the1% Elite  same as they  had  Chelsea Manning, back in jail not long ago  because she wouldn't testify against him , but in  the USA  they can't  hold you but so long without giving you a tiral  so they had to let her go because she was pardoned . But  it looks  like ether  hes going come to the USA  or  there not going to let him out  hes in jail ether way . that what Ed Ed Vallejo, Reporter at AX that use to work with him before he became famous said . 

 

If hes gets out he done something because the 1% have all the money in the world to   keep him in there  as long as hes in the UK  because they have  been bought out. None of that matters  if he comes to the USA  or  not   all that matters  to them that hes in there tell he dies  it could take forever to get him sent  to  the USA  it most the time takes years  if it's a high profile case . All that formality stuff is just to keep him in jail  is all  . he not out on bail like Kim Dotcom  hes in jail  were they want him  to stay at  .As long as hes in there there wining.