Well, my actual website is now fully operational. I assure you, it is quite deadly. A lot of the content from this blog has been copied over there already, not sure if I'll move the rest or not.
All this and more! Except, not really.
In preparation for my eventual weekly editorial over at http://www.9to5.cc/ I am going to take a couple of practice swings at my idea for a recurring article. I call it "What the Fuck World?" because I think swearing is funny.
Basically, the idea is that I'll keep tabs on some of the top trending searches in the world for a week and then write about my favorites on Mondays. Today is Wednesday, and instead of a whole week, I'm just doing the searches from right now. I know I'm cheating, but it's my article and I make the rules so fuck yourselves. See? Cussing. Classic.
So what's going on in the world today? (Heh, I almost wrote "toady").
Lance Armstrong
Why is Lance Armstrong in the news again? Oh, he's retiring. Again. Don't worry though, he's going to keep fight cancer... or something. Why do people care about Lance Armstrong? Well.. he has those classy yellow rubber wristbands and beat testicular cancer for one, and for two, he may have won so often by cheating. Even though he was never caught, his teammate Floyd Landis alleged that good ole' Lance doped himself and also showed other cyclists how to beat testing (and he's not alone, this Armstrong fellow that every body's into has had like a dozen similar allegations brought against him). Anyways, he retired in 2005, then had a comeback in 2008 with a goal of racing in 2009 Tour de France, he finished 3rd. So yeah, he's retiring again, better quit while you're ahead, to fight cancer.
Anonymous Hacks HBGary
Now THIS is what I'm talking about. What's HBGary? They're a technology security firm. These guys are big deals in the electronic security biz, one of their biggest clients is the US Federal Government. What happened? They were hacked by Anonymous.
Ah... 4chan. Why CEO of HBGary Aaron Barr would possibly want to piss off Anonymous, I could not explain. I mean, sure they occasionally hack the hell out of various websites and banks and what not, but to specifically call them out seems like jumping in the deep end, wearing lead boots, in a shark infested pool on your period. I'm sorry, I meant while menstruating.
So a couple of days ago, Aaron Barr claimed that he had infiltrated Anonymous and was willing to sell their identities. He claimed that he had the names of key members and leaders and that he tracked the information through IRC, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Anonymous claims that they know who's on the list, and that it's not them, and it's certainly not their leaders. On February 4th, the Financial Times ran the story about Barr's claims and then Barr made an appointment with the FBI (since the FBI doesn't like Anonymous either) to presumably sell them the list, even though some of his own people questioned his methodology. Where's the mistake here? One, he was half cocked, two, he announced his intentions publicly.
One day later, on February 5th, Anonymous more or less shut down his network. The also took down the HBGary Federal site and left a very public notice of their intentions, calling him out and saying he knows nothing about security (that looks really good for a security firm I'd imagine). They were just getting started, the broke into HBGary Federal's e-mail server, extracted 40,000 e-mails and posted them on Pirate Bay, the else claim to have deleted about a TB of HBGary backup data, you know, just cuz.
Barr starts panicking and tries to get help from his colleagues. In an amazing act, the President of HBGary (which owns HBGary Federal, the company Barr works for) Penny Leavy logs into Anonymous' IRC chat rooms and asks them to leave her company alone. Hilarity ensues (Penny joins at line 522, if you've got the time, it's a worthwhile read). But how did Barr compile this list? I will oversimplify, but basically, he created multiple aliases and started logging into Anonymous chats to try to "infiltrate" them. He linked their IRC handles to Twitter and Facebook accounts, then cross referenced their friend groups and tried to make sense of it. He even started to play his real life personage against his made up IRC self. Basically, if someone posted something on an IRC webchat, and then someone posted something similar on Twitter, and someone made a similar wall post of Facebook, they MUST be the same person, right? As I mentioned before, even those in his own organization found his methodology faulty.
Last week he revealed himself to a person who he believes is CommanderX (one of Anonymous' particularly effective hackers), telling him that he doesn't want them to end up in jail, and he's just pointing out the vulnerabilities of social media. Whoever this person was, Barr's pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears. They kept hacking his personal accounts shutting down his devices, basically trying to push him off the Internet. In the IRC chat above, they told Penny Leavy that it would all stop if they just fired Barr.
Then, shit got real. When they got inside of HBGary's computer, Anonymous found links between the Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of America, including plans to falsely incriminate their opposition, planting fake documents, cyber attacks, you know... totally legal stuff that a security company working for the government should do... yeah. They also uncovered HBGary's plans to launch a smear campaign to help undermine Wikileaks.
As of today, HBGary has cancelled all of its public appearances at public events, saying some of its staff has been threatened, and that's where we're at.
Wow, that was longer than I expected, I think I'll do one more.
CBS' Lara Logan
I'm not gonna lie, I sort of hoped that Lara Logan was involved in a sex tape, not that she's particularly hot or anything, I just thought it would be a good way to cap off this post.
But no, this ties in with Egypt and how the media is being treated. But looks like I was wrong, there was some sex, just not the good kind. While covering Mubarak stepping down, a part of the mob cut off Logan from her crew the proceeded to beat, assault and sexually abuse her until she was eventually rescued by another, presumably friendlier group (made up of Egyptian women and soldiers). She was flown back to the US and hospitalized. Somebody named Nir Rosen from NYU's Center on Law and Security made fun of her on Twitter, saying she was trying to outdo Anderson Cooper (who was also attacked in Cairo).
Yep, he made fun of her for being mobbed and sexually abused, what a guy. In the end, he apologized and the resigned from his job. Dumbass.
-K
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