Thread: LulzSec hackers arrested after ringleader turns informant

Mar 06, 2012

LulzSec hackers arrested after ringleader turns informant

By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY Updated 7m ago

Five members of the elite hacking group LulzSec have been charged with cyberattacks following an international investigaton in a which a ringleader of the global organization began secretly working as an FBI informant, authorities announced today.

An indictment unsealed in New York says Hector Xavier Monsegur, of New York, a legendary hacker known as "Sabu," was charged with conspiracy to engage in computer hacking, among other offenses, and pleaded guilty in August.

According to the court papers, Monsegur was an "influential member of three hacking organizations — Anonymous, Internet Feds and Lulz Security — that were responsible for multiple cyberattacks on the computer systems of various businesses and governments in the United States and throughout the world."

Monsegur then began cooperating with the FBI against other members of LulzSec, the group that he had created in May and which is accused of breaking into business and government entitites worldwid, stealing confidential information and defacing websites.

Irish police say they have arrested one of the five suspects in Dublin.

Some alleged associates of the group are already facing charges elsewhere. An English teenager, Ryan Cleary, was arrested by the British in June. In July, a reputed LulzSec spokesman, Jake Davis, was arrested in Scotland, the Associated Press reports.

According to court papers unsealed today, Monsegur and others planted a fake story that slain rapper Tupac Shakur was alive in New Zealand in retaliation for what they perceived to be unfavorable news coverage of Wikileaks on the PBS news program Frontline.

Original posting: LulzSec, also known as Lulz Security, and Anonymous have claimed responsibility for hacking into such companies and institutions as the CIA, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency, Japan's Sony Corp and Mexican government websites, Reuters reports.

Foxnews. com, in an exclusive report, says law enforcement officers on two continents nabbed three LulzSec leaders early today and charged two more with conspiracy.

It reports that two of those charged are from London, two from Ireland and one from Chicago.

Irish police say they have arrested 1 of 5 men being sought in LulzSec hacking case, the Associated Press reports.

Foxnews.com says the authorities were acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization's leader who, according to unidentified sources, has been secretly working for the government for months.

"This is devastating to the organization," an FBI official involved with the investigation tells Fox News. "We're chopping off the head of LulzSec."

Foxnews.com reports that was LulzSec was allegedly led by a 28-year-old hacker identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur, who used the Internet alias "Sabu."

Foxnews.com says Monsegur, who operated out of a public housing project in New York City, was arrested last June and has been cooperating with the FBI.

Foxnews.com says an indictment in the case will be unsealed today in the Southern District Court of New York.

LulzSec hackers arrested after ringleader turns informant

Foxnews.com says Monsegur, who operated out of a public housing project in New York City, was arrested last June and has been cooperating with the FBI

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Bust Reveals Government Runs Hacking Groups
Tuesday, March 06, 2012 10:01

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 6, 2012

The establishment media has characterized the leader of LulzSec ratting out his hacktivist comrades as betrayal, but the incident reveals something far more sinister – government is responsible for creating and unleashing computer hacker groups.



Hector Xavier Monsegur, said to be the leader of LulzSec, worked for the FBI, according to news reports. He was reportedly arrested in Puerto Rico last June, pleaded guilty to hacking charges, and then began working with the FBI – or so the cover story would have it.

Monsequr, aka Sabu, decided what targets to attack and who would participate in the attacks, more than likely at the direction of this FBI handlers. It is believed he participated in the Anonymous effort to hack HBGary, the security firm that works closely with the CIA, NSA, FBI, and the Pentagon.

Sabu’s Lulz Security, commonly abbreviated as LulzSec, claimed responsibility for taking the CIA website offline. It also attacked Fox News, PBS, Sony, and a number of gamer sites. LulzSec claims to have hacked local InfraGard chapter sites, the organization affiliated with the FBI, and released the emails and passwords of a number of users of senate.gov.

LulzSec and Anonymous attacks have provided the government with an excuse to push their cyber security agenda and propaganda campaign, including the proposal for a “kill switch” that would have allowed Obama to shut down the internet (due to public outrage, the proposal was dropped from a House bill in February).

Government and corporate groups cited LulzSec and Anonymous lawlessness last June to push the so-called Protect IP Act (known as PIPA). The introduction of a House version of the bill, dubbed SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act), was met with public outrage and widespread activism that forced Congress to reconsider the legislation.

In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent terrorism.

Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

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Disillusioned ex-Anonymous first outed Sabu last year

by Elinor Mills | March 7, 2012 7:36 PM PST

Jennifer Emick, who picketed Scientology with the group, says it took her four hours to put a real name to the well-known hacker handle.

The trail to the New York apartment where a hacker named "Sabu" of LulzSec and Anonymous fame was arrested last June can be traced back to a former Anonymous participant who turned against the group over its WikiLeaks activities.

Sabu, whose name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges in August and spent the last six months working as an informant for the FBI. The undercover operation led to hacking-related charges being filed against four alleged cohorts in the U.K., Ireland, and Chicago yesterday.

Sabu was the proverbial big fish who was admired among other hackers and hailed as an online freedom fighter. And unmasking him became a favorite hobby for rivals last year. But it was Jennifer Emick, after being harassed online for criticizing Anonymous' hacking activities, who was the first to match a face and real name with the well-known hacker handle.

"It took me four hours to find Sabu," Emick told CNET today.

It was February 2011 when she and her partners at Backtrace Security compiled a list of identities they believed were tied to the hacker handles associated with the HBGary Federal hack and others. Her break with discovering Sabu's identity came to her from a friend in the group in the form of log files from an Internet Relay Chat room in which Sabu and other LulzSec members discussed the HBGary Federal compromise, she said. One of the log files contained a domain that led to a subdomain that had a mirror to a page where Monsegur posted photos and video of his beloved Toyota AE86 on acar enthusiast social-networking site. That led to a YouTube video that had information that allowed Emick to eventually find Monsegur's Facebook page using a Google search.

Shortly after Backtrace Security posted the list of alleged hacker identities on the Web in March 2011, it got a call from the FBI asking it to remove the list and pass the information on to the feds, Emick said.

Backtrace Security has been following Sabu's activities and communicating with the feds since then but was not involved in the investigation enough to know that Sabu had agreed to turn over his fellow hackers. But Emick said she suspected something was up when Sabu disappeared from IRC for more than a week in June and from Twitter for almost a month.

She speculated that the FBI maintained the undercover operation long enough for Sabu to re-establish trust after his disappearance and to allow them time to gather evidence that would be needed to prosecute his colleagues.

FBI officials did not return calls seeking comment for this story. The FBI was able to warn some of the hacking group's targets and alerted 300 government and private entities globally to potential holes in their computer systems, Fox News reported. Agents even ordered Sabu to call hackers off a planned attack on the CIA's public Web site, the report says. "You're knocking over a bee's nest," he warned them. "Stop."

But it's unclear what was going on with the compromise of global intelligence firm Stratfor in December. The hackers stole 860,000 e-mail addresses and 75,000 unencrypted credit card numbers in that attack and released them on the Web.

Asked why she thinks the feds didn't or weren't able to interfere with the Stratfor hack, Emick speculated that it could have been an elaborate sting to get the hackers to show their hand, or that Stratfor "fell on its sword on purpose" because the company seemed to know about the breach the day it happened. Stratfor representatives did not return a phone call seeking comment today.

Things started getting fishy again when he Sabu "took off" about five weeks ago, Emick said, declining to reveal more specifics. Then some Austrian and German hackers became suspicious about Sabu a couple of weeks ago and set up their own server despite his entreaties that they use his server because theirs was owned by the U.S. feds, according to Emick. Then on Monday night hackers started deleting their hard drives because they knew something was up with Sabu, she said.

Many Anonymous participants are shocked and angered by the news that Sabu had turned on his compatriots. And some are probably eating crow that Emick was right about Sabu's identity after all.

"The path to the data looks like Backtrace Security," said Greg Housh, an Internet activist and former Anonymous supporter who still observes the group. "That bothers a lot of people because none of us like them."

But Housh reserved his harshest criticism for the FBI, which he accused of relying on "very old-school tactics" in their investigations. "They take down the most vocal guy and hope that gets everyone to stop," he said. "It won't. That's not how the Internet works."

Emick seems to think the strategy works and is doing her part to help. "I've recruited like nine active informants on my on, so who knows how many there are really," she said.

She used to be part of Anonymous herself, back in 2008 and 2009, specifically for the group's Church of Scientology protests. "We went to Scientology pickets," she said. "It was a part of the group that was funny and tongue-in-cheek. At the time there was not hacktivism...It was a generally law-abiding thing. You had to be because it was a religious cult that would take you to court."

But Emick, who was writing about religion for About.com at the time, got disillusioned with Anonymous when the group began aligning itself with WikiLeaks and hacking into networks. "I was being naive at the time," she said. "I was asking, 'why are people who built their reputations on credit card fraud hanging out?' At the time I thought script kiddies and hackers in the soup, and they have access to peoples' details! This is not good."

She says to expect more arrests.

"There's going to be more to the story," she said. "There's stuff I can't talk about right now. People come to me and probably some people came out on their own and they'll be OK. A lot of these people who got involved are kids who didn't know what they got into."

Disillusioned ex-Anonymous first outed Sabu last year | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

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