Just making it easy
Why not just walk into an FBI office and declare you are LulzSec? Do these hackers get reduced sentences for being dumb?
In a predictable backlash against the sweep that has netted suspected LulzSec members in America and Europe, Anonymous has defaced some web pages of the security firm Panda Security. As previously reported by The Register, the arrests turned on the assistance of Hector Xavier Monsegur, known in LulzSec circles as Sabu. …
>>>>>now all of the Stratfor leak can be made questionable as fabricated because it comes from a source that is known to be compromised.
Huh, what? The Stratfor leak always came from a source that could be compromised! Random shit, posted on the internet, is not exactly the world's most credible chain of evidence.
This news makes it no more, or less, likely that any of it has been faked.
Suspicion of government is a healthy attitude to maintain. So long as you're able to recognise when it's more likely the government is telling the truth - as it often does.
Assuming that Anonymous/Lulzsec are trustworthy by default (and made less so by interaction with government) is plain stupid.
Anon/LulzSec hack into systems and break them - BAD
They release documents that show inner workings of govt, some of which is corrupt - GOOD
They piss off the FBI - BAD (idea)
FBI arrests people who broke things, probably LulzSec - err ... good? I think?
People arrested get abused in prison - BAD
Verdict: everything is BAD and broken forever. Also, it's raining and my coffee is cold.
Nope. I thought of panda cars.
Defacing panda cars with anti-police grafitti perhaps...
But I salute you for your mental acuity. Clearly these pandas are not to be trusted. Despatched by the Chinese government on multi-year secret missions to the world's most important cities - they lull their hosts into a false sense of security by their laziness. But clearly no sensible person can believe such a ludicrous animal could be real? Conclusion, they must be secret-police-disguised-as-pandas. Obvious innit.
Note for non-UK readers, Panda Cars are local police patrol units, which when introduced in the 1960s were generally Light Blue with White doors. They tend to be silver now, because they have a better resale value, if a standard GM Compact Astra thrashed to death by our braveboys in blue could ever be deemed to have a resale value.
On March 6th the hacking group LulzSec, part of Anonymous, obtained access to a Panda Security webserver hosted outside of the Panda Security internal network. This server was used only for marketing campaigns and to host some of the company’s blogs. Neither the main website www.pandasecurity.com nor www.cloudantivirus.com were affected in the attack. The attack did not breach Panda Security’s internal network and neither source code, update servers nor customer data was accessed. The only information accessed was related to marketing campaigns such as landing pages and some obsolete credentials, including supposed credentials for employees that have not been working at Panda for over five years.
We continue investigating the cause of the intrusion and will provide more details as soon as they become available. Meanwhile we assure all our customers and partners that none of their information has been compromised and that our products and services continue functioning as normal.
Yes, but lets be honest Panda...
For all your knee- bent-running-about-crisis-management-behaviour, you still look a bit silly.
Being self styled online security experts. There's really no getting away from that, is there?
Intrusion detection? Backup & recovery? Password security? Patching?
Panda, you were beaten at the very game your tout yourselves as being experts in. Supposedly experts in preventing what happened to you from happening to others. If you think for a minute you can word-smith and spin yourselves out of an embarrassing and untenable position you're as delusional as they come.
What you need to do is acknowledge you were had and then move on from there and do better. But, since you'd have us believe you're the very best, I'd suggest you have just put your foot in your mouth, stepped on your crank and any number of things that demonstrate your basic, underlying, incompetence.
The internals, where Panda product are deployed, were unaffected by the hack. The marketing sites, controlled by the clueless drones and bean counters who ignored our security advice for ease of use and cost control, were hacked. So their product is good, AND they've provided evidence of what happens when it's ignored.
See how easy that is? And I don't even work for or use their product.
It appears that Sabu is being denounced because the other Anon/Lulzsec members think he's a "snitch" - I'd be interested to see how the other members of Anon/Lulzsec stand up to interrogation by professional law enforcement. I suspect they think it'd be easy, I mean, how hard can it be?
Well, it turns out very hard (I speak from experience), especially if you're the sort of person who gets cocky and doesn't just stick with "No Comment" as an answer to anything.
According to reports I've read, there wasn't much interrogating. Police knocked on his door, he realized the jig was up and just how badly he was screwed and started chattering away before they even took him down to be booked. After he'd been booked, he was pretty much a sock puppet for the FBI. Which means the other arrests that have just been made are likely to hold up well in court. The question for LULZ and anon is: How much do you trust those people not to turn just as quickly as Sabu did?