The notorious hacktivist group Anonymous has been essentially neutralized according to the FBI, which cited a series of arrests as putting a damper on the group’s influence.
The FBI believes that the identification and subsequent arrests
last year of five members of “Lulz Security” – described
as a powerful player within the largely amorphous Anonymous
collective – have acted as a “huge deterrent effect,”
according to Austin P. Berglas, the assistant special agent in
charge of the bureau’s cyber division in New York.
All five members of Lulz Security, which was at least at the time
considered one of the most legitimate threats within the
Anonymous community, have pled guilty.
LulzSec had at the time claimed responsibility for attacks
against Sony Pictures as well as Fox’s “X-Factor”
reality TV series. Along with LulzSec, the FBI also arrested a
sixth individual at that time that operated with another group,
Antisec.
“All of these guys were major players in the Anonymous
movement, and a lot of people looked to them just because of what
they did,” Berglas said in an interview with the Huffington
Post.
In 2012, an informant known in cyber circles as “Sabu,”
or Hector Monsegur, began to cooperate with the FBI following his
arrest. According to Berglas, that action and the arrests that
followed led to an “added layer of distrust” within Anonymous.
“The movement is still there, and they’re still yacking on
Twitter and posting things, but you don’t hear about these guys
coming forward with those large breaches,” he said.
“It’s just not happening, and that’s because of the
dismantlement of the largest players.”
Indeed, a brief search through Twitter and Facebook will yield a
plethora of active Anonymous groups, many of which have now
evolved into other roles such as de-facto newswires which also
promote online activism on behalf of a broad list of
causes.
According to the FBI, its arrests last year have directly led to
a decrease in high-profile cyber attacks. That news is in
contrast to the group’s heyday in 2010, when Anonymous carried
out a number of attacks against US companies, banks, and
government agencies, employing sophisticated denial-of-service
tools and defacing websites.
The cyber division of the FBI is divided into five teams of
investigators. One entire unit is focused on obtaining digital
evidence from cell phones, cameras, computers, and tablets in
order to support a wide range of investigations including
organized crime, computer hacking, and child pornography, the
Huffington Post reported.
Berglas said his investigators have become very adept at breaking
encryption methods used to protect computer files.
Sabu’s capture, for example, was said to be made possible when he
inadvertently left his IP address exposed – a seemingly
elementary mistake for anyone with significant ties to groups
like AntiSec or LulzSec. That mistake allowed federal
investigators to track down his location in Manhattan’s Lower
East Side.
Republished from: RT