Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
The Unlikely Profile of a "Most Wanted" Hacker
March 8, 2012
If you believe Hollywood, there's a lot of glamour involved with the life of a hacker. Not so much in real life, as a recent Fox article highlighted. Hector Monsegur, 28, was confronted by FBI agents in June of 2011 in an unlikely place – a public housing unit in New York. Monsegur proved to be the hacker known as "Sabu," thought to be the ringleader of the Anonymous offshoot group LulzSec.
Monsegur lived on public assistance with his two young children. The children gave law enforcement the leverage needed to secure Monsegur's cooperation – he didn't want to go to jail and be separated from them. When arrested, Monsegur and his associates had been on a month-long hacking spree involving the CIA, Fox, Sony and several financial institutions, causing billions of dollars in damages.
But here he was, a welfare recipient and unemployed computer programmer living in very modest surroundings. Hardly the stuff of the silver screen. So how did they get him? He was brilliant – but also lazy. He had always hidden his IP address through proxy servers. But he slipped up once and logged into an Internet relay chatroom without masking his IP address. That was all the FBI needed.
For a while, they waited and watched his online activity, but their hand was forced when he was "doxed," and his real name and address were posted online. The FBI had already gotten his Facebook account, where he was selling stolen credit card numbers to other hackers – that was enough to charge him with aggravated identity theft. By August, he had pled guilty to a dozen counts of hacking charges and had agreed to cooperate with the FBI.
Not until this week was all this made public. "Sabu" had decided to give up his buddies in Anonymous to the FBI and five them were recently arrested, two in Britain and two in Ireland. The fifth individual, Jeremy Hammond, was charged with being behind the "Stratfor" hack in December of 2011.
It would appear that some members of Anonymous have lost their anonymity.
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