This was in response to a report released by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) that stated their computer network had been hacked more than 100 times in 2011. The main push of the news story was to frighten people. The Senator (Bill Nelson – FL D) continued on the vein of how we are living in dangerous times and how exposed we are in an obvious attempt to win viewer support for the upcoming Cybersecurity Act of 2012 . Why would they want to do this? Well the first thing that came to mind was they do not want a repeat of the type of public outcry that happened with SOPA and PIPA.  So they are putting the word out on “trusted” news outlets and using “friendly” faces. Senator Nelson has been known as one of the good guys in Florida and is widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats so he gets the job of pushing the bill down here in Florida.

Now, if that was the only thing that I saw I would have ignored it. Unfortunately, not long after that piece of news I ran into two stories on CNET.com that follow the same trend. The first was one on the splinter group LulzSec. Here we have an article using Fox News (of all things) as a source and makes the claim that the leader of LulzSec who goes by the name of Sabu was secretly arrested and is now turning on his former associates. This allegedly has led to three arrests. If you remember LulzSec broke off from the Anonymous Collective after they released information about police informants and the home addresses of Police officers (which was originally attributed to AntiSec). This move angered the rest of the collective enough that there was a minor internal struggle which ended up with the LulzSec servers being brought down (and other things including AnonOps).  The real story that five Hackers were arrested and charged with Conspiracy, four were said to members of LulzSec and one is an Anonymous “member” according to the Fox News Story.  So why release this information? If you are thinking to scare ordinary people from joining any online activist group like Anonymous you would be very right.

Sabu was identified by a person known as The Jester quite a while ago (June 26th actually) and was called out for some of his behavior on The Jester’s Blog. To find out the name of Sabu he dug into the Who Is records for different domains related to the LulzSecurity.com domain and in the dump of an offshoot (PRVT.ORG) here he found the name Hector Monsegur as the registrant and even found a street address. It is entirely possible that Monsegur was the subject of an investigation after this post by The Jester and arrested. However, what is not known is IF he actually gave away the names of other members. If he was arrested in August 2011, why wait 6 months to arrest the others? Normally if someone gives up information it is acted upon very quickly as in the case of hacking activity it can be critical to gather data from the systems used before it is lost you can only go back so many layers to recover data one it has been over written (about 20-25 layers is the current limit). Not to mention once Sabu was no longer online it is possible that the people involved would destroy any magnetic media used in their systems (Hard Drives are cheap). So again, why the delay? Our guess here is that these others were already suspected, but not enough evidence was in hand to do anything. We do not think their names were freely given up, but that carelessness and a very picky investigation caused their downfall.

Next up on the FUD list was an article co-authored by the Congress Persons that are sponsoring the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. Yep you heard right, CNET published an article in favor of the new bill as news on their site. The article does not directly call out Anonymous, but it uses the Terrorist angle and actually says;

“It feels like we're back to the days before September 11, 2001. The system is blinking red. Yet, we are failing to connect the dots--again.”

Now it is important to remember that the CIA, the NSA and the FBI all have likened Anonymous to terrorists so they are hoping that people make the same leap of logic that they did. However, this is a VERY transparent use of popular media in an attempt “get the word out” about this dangerous threat to the US infrastructure so that they will have popular support for this bill and others all in the name of protecting the people. As we said, they are trying to learn from the lessons taught to them over SOPA and PIPA.

The problem here is that this type of media manipulation does not go very far with the Internet crowd. They often do read all of the links and also read other sources to find out more information (not always the full story though).  The sad fact of the matter is that the US infrastructure has been poorly maintained and secured just like all of the corporations out there. They want to spend pennies on proper IT and security so they can keep up profit. When the economy started to sag, some of the first things to go were IT resources. Many companies cut them out or went with Managed Service Providers. This is also a dangerous trend as now you have many companies protected by small groups of people that are paid as little as possible to maintain company profit and loss numbers.

There is no quick or inexpensive way to dig the US out of the mess it is in right now. Companies and Government Agencies need to understand that they must spend the right money on the right talent and technology to make changes. Sadly all we have are the technically incompetent led by the paranoid both of which have corporate lobbyists whispering in their ears that they really should focus on Copy Right and IP instead.

Mark our words, you can expect more of the same type of news story on your TV and on the major News sites in the coming weeks and as they get more desperate, they articles will get more outlandish.

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