More e-mail messages believed to belong to HBGary Federal Chief Operating Officer Greg Hoglund were posted online Sunday, fulfilling a promise by online mischief making group Anonymous to further embarrass the Washington D.C. security firm, whose CEO aroused the ire of the hacktivists last week.
A 2 gigabyte file titled “HBGary More Leaked Emails” was posted on the file swapping Website The Pirate Bay on Sunday and purports to be a collection of some 27,000 email messages from Hoglund, a noted malware researcher who is an expert on rootkits, among other topics.
In a statement accompanying the post, Anonymous claimed it was releasing Hoglund’s e-mail to retaliate for the COO’s threats to “bring down” Anonymous with the help of law enforcement.
“Let’s not forget that the first time you tried to do something like this, we did not overlook it, and we are not overlooking it now,” the message reads, in an obvious reference to HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr’s pledge, in an article in the Financial Times, that he would use a presentation at the Security B-Sides Conference to reveal the names of Anonymous members.
The group responded within days, exploiting security vulnerabilities in an HBGary Web site and using social engineering to gain access to company resources, including the HBGary e-mail server and social networking accounts belonging to Barr and others.
In all, the group claims to have released 71,000 e-mails in all from the company since last week. Those emails have already produced their share of controversy, including revelations that HBGary Federal’s senior management had proposed campaigns to discredit Wikileaks and its supporters, and to engage in political skullduggery on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
