Anonymous Hacks FBI Teleconference about Anonymous

[Solauren]

Anonymous Hacks FBI Teleconference

Anonymous hacks phone call between FBI, U.K. police
Hacking collective itself was subject of secret conference call

The Associated Press
Posted: Feb 3, 2012 10:55 AM ET
Last Updated: Feb 3, 2012 10:53 AM ET

The hacking collective Anonymous intercepted a phone call between the FBI and British police discussing it and cybercrime. (CBC)

A sensitive conference call between FBI and British police's cybercrime investigators was recorded by Anonymous, the very group they were trying to catch, officials and hackers said Friday.

The hacking collective published a roughly 15-minute-long recording of a conference call apparently devoted to tracking and prosecuting members of the loosely-knit group.

The FBI said the information "was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible," the bureau said in a statement.

It's not clear how the hackers got their hands on the recording, which appears to have been edited to bleep out the names of some of the suspects being discussed.

"The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now," the group gloated in a message posted to Twitter.

Amid the material published by Anonymous was a message purportedly sent by an FBI agent to international law enforcement agencies. It invites his foreign counterparts to join the call to "discuss the ongoing investigations related to Anonymous ... and other associated splinter groups." The email contained a phone number and password for accessing the call.

The email is addressed to officials in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and France, but only American and British officials can be heard on the recording.

Graham Cluley, an expert with data security company Sophos, said that hackers had been able to eavesdrop on the call because they had compromised an investigator's emails.

"No doubt the police authorities will be appalled to realize that the very people that they are trying to apprehend, could have been tuning in to their internal conversations," he wrote in a blog post.

The recorded discussion itself appears sensitive. Those on the call talk about what legal strategy to pursue in the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis -- two British suspects linked to Anonymous -- and discuss details of the evidence gathered against other suspects.

Karen Todner, a lawyer for Cleary, said that the recording could be "incredibly sensitive" and warned that such data breaches had the potential to derail the police's work. "If they haven't secured their email it could potentially prejudice the investigation," she told The Associated Press.

Anonymous is an amorphous collection of Internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists whose targets have included the Church of Scientology, the music industry, and financial companies such as Visa and MasterCard.

Following a spate of arrests across the world, the group and its various offshoots have focused their attention on law enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular.

Okay, so, they're trying to piss off International Law Enforcement to the point of what? Them all getting thrown in Guantonimo Bay as a threat to the security of the United States?

I mean, if they can do that to the FBI, what's to prevent them from doing it to say the CIA or NSA?

[Baffalo]

It's supposed to be a message to the FBI and others. They're trying to say, "Look at us. We know you're looking for us and you can't stop us. <insert other Anonymous propaganda here>."

Of course, then again, computer security is something that no matter how hard you work to try and secure your websites, when you have hundreds of people accessing it, it's easy to just call someone "There's a problem with your account, so can you give me your username and password?"

[Kamakazie Sith]

What's really made very unpopular with the law enforcement community isn't the hacking but how they've indiscriminately released private information of law enforcement personnel to the web. When they do this they build a perception that they're a danger to the families..I mean why else would you release the names of family members.

[Faqa]

Their logic goes (I think) that those officers can find out who anyone else is - so turnabout is fair play. And as I recall, they mainly did that to officers suppressing Occupy riots - which they saw as The Man keeping them down.

If you accept their basic 13-year-old-jerkoff premise of basically living in the world of V for Vendetta where the police are basically the S.S, then the logic makes sense.

I mean, if they can do that to the FBI, what's to prevent them from doing it to say the CIA or NSA?

Baffalo summed up in that comic why this basically means nothing - but I'll just add that if the FBI really cared about it being secure, it would be. Sending out a mass-emails of "join this convo, peeps" is.... not caring about security.

[Solauren]

You and I will accept that, Faqa.

However, you don't think the FBI can't use this as ammo to get things elevated? You don't think the land of 'make a funny tweet, get labelled a terrorist' WON'T do that?

[Faqa]

Not really. The FBI looks worse, not better as a result of this stunt. They're not exactly showing that they're doing their best with what they have, are they?

Also, they're, uh, already probably looking really hard for these assholes who are the public face of ideological cracking. What are you afraid of them "elevating"?

Which is not to say that federal excesses of the sort you're speaking of don't worry me. I think only now are we really understanding the extent of the power the U.S public handed over in 2001, how much of it can expand itself.... and how vanishingly unlikely it is that the U.S Government will voluntarily relinquish any of said power. And that is some scary shit.

[Thanas]

That is pretty good PR there.

[Mr Bean]

I saw this on the CBS Evening News last night, and Scott Pelley said the call was not classified and not on a secure line; they weren't actually discussing anything sensitive and made no effort to protect it.

That makes it even worse considering it was a call about Anonymous, and from the transcript they were discussion specific case details it means not only were they talking about confidential details over an unsecured line (Violating FBI regs) but they admitting to do so. That's like excusing away the reason you ran your car into that tree was not because you were over-tired but because you were drinking.

[Baffalo]

Anonymous has no leadership, which is both an advantage and disadvantage. It's an advantage in that it'll be harder for the FBI to take them down all at once, though given that they must communicate, getting just one or two will let them track down a few more eventually. It's a huge disadvantage because it's literal chaos trying to direct the combined efforts of the entire Anonymous organization.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Anonymous' main power comes from their "Low Orbital Ion Cannon" or LOIC. The LOIC is supposed to be a proxy-hosted server that bounces each user's IP around to mask it before using the combined efforts of each user to overload websites. They do this primarily by turning each computer into part of a super computer, each given a tiny task to perform. Since many websites have limits on the number of attempts you can make on an account, they simply bounce it off each computer until they break the password or overload the website. Another tactic would be to exceed their allocated bandwidth and force the website offline.

The problem for Anonymous is going to be that yes, some companies and organizations keep their information on one server, but others like the FBI, CIA and NSA all have public servers for public information, and private, secure servers with very few external ports. This is where the real files are being kept, and this is where Anonymous will have quite a pickle. Anonymous is powerful, yes, but only against systems that are remotely accessible. That's why we haven't seen the CIA or FBI's secrets laid out for the world to see. If Anonymous really could, they'd have done it by now. Or, an even scarier scenario is that they may have it all already, and are just waiting to drop the hammer if the FBI comes calling.

[madd0ct0r]

I just saw it as an enormous piss take - The FBI and Mi5 are trying to get us, and here's the phonecall! Way to go security agencies. living up to your name there.

or some such thing.

Anonymous are extremely popular over here with disaffected teenagers (that's true everywhere) but we might be seeing a greater internationalization of the movement over time. Same as how the facebook block means everyone in Vietnam younger then 30 now uses a proxy server, torrent, ultrasurf, TOR or equivalent.

[Ariphaos]

Of course, then again, computer security is something that no matter how hard you work to try and secure your websites, when you have hundreds of people accessing it, it's easy to just call someone "There's a problem with your account, so can you give me your username and password?"

No, the comic is what it says - taking down a generally secure website is usually not about hacking and simply about making sure it isn't available to others. This is most readily done via bringing down the target's DNS servers, but the 'trick hundreds of thousands of visitors into running the javascript LOIC tool' tactic can work too.