Hack Back! — Discussions on hacking, Anarchism and secure OSs by B_Meson. (Or why we should not ask questions of hackers.)
From the post:
I recently had an exchange with the notorious hacker who hacked Hacking Team, a now infamous Italian company that sold spyware to oppressive regimes, which was used to target dissidents and journalists with spyware. Previously, the hacker breached Gamma Group, a similar corporation and dumped 40GB of files onto the Internet*. HB! was able to penetrate their customer support portal, where they obtained a list of targets in Bahrain . While 40GB seems like a large number, 30+ GB of it is a password protected zip file, presumably (according to HB) containing a full copy of the FinFisher server software, that no one has cracked.
(image omitted)
The Hacking Team breach was much larger, containing about 400GB of useful files. These hacks, besides being technically interesting, seems driven by political and human rights concerns. Further, by releasing their emails and source code, we found key details of how these corporations operate, an example being the CEO of Hacking Team ending all of his emails with a famous line attributed to Benito Mussolini.
By releasing the source code, some zero days that these corporations were using have been patched, they have lost numerous clients and their own engineers are leaving the field. The technical details of the hack are quite interesting themselves as the techniques are quite sophisticated. The hacker, who uses several alias including Hack Back!, Gamma Group PR and Phineas Phisher recently attacked a police “union” in Barcelona. In one of the most interesting hacks, Hack Back! exfiltrated a bunch of Bitcoin and sent it to Rojava in their struggle for autonomy against multiple international forces, including ISIS.
We spoke over a variety of topics including secure computation, anarchism, international solidarity, and prison abolition. Our transcript has been lightly edited, translated and some details left out for operation security purposes. I use the name HB to refer to his Hack Back! alias.
…
It’s an interesting and inspirational interview.
However, questions about political groups, books, music, etc., result in tells that even fairly inept government agents could follow.
At the very least, conduct interviews with hackers through intermediaries who can change language style and omit information that obviously leads to tells.
Better yet: Don’t ask. Don’t Tell.
What isn’t written down or spoken aloud is incapable of being discovered.
Yes?