Monday, February 7th, 2011, 12:20 pm. Karim Hijazi, CEO of the start-up security contractor Unveillance, has been following the HBGary situation closely since the previous evening, when Forbes first announced that the company's servers had been infiltrated by Anonymous-affiliated hackers.

Currently doing what we can to help quell the situation with HBGary, he wrote to an industry colleague who had e-mailed to check in on a project. What a mess. 

He didn't know the half of it.



Things weren't going much better for the HBGary crew back on IRC. For nearly two hours, Penny had faced an onslaught of text  part uncomfortable questioning, part accusatory declarations. As I summarized at one point under my longtime IRC nickname:

c0s: Penny: in the end the biggest problem of all was the huge list of innocent people who were on that list that were completely wrong, misidentified. All of them being handed to the FBI as people taking part in illegal activities. 

Not only had the inaccuracy of the data potentially endangered a number of Facebook users whom Barr had mistakenly matched to actual Anons based on the IRC; it had also contributed to Barr's overconfidence in thinking he held all the cards by virtue of knowing the identities of our leadership. Q, whom Barr had identified as being of one of Ben de Vries' several identities, was now in the IRC, occasionally joking about his inexplicable promotion to co-founder of a movement that had never really been founded. Here Barr's mistake stemmed from the fact that Q was listed as having created a talk channel called anonymous, on the Anonops server, but Anonymous itself predated that server by several years by any reckoning. And Ben de Vries, whom Barr had spent a portion of his evening convincing of his own lack of ill intent towards his group, had no real connection to Anonymous  much less any control over it.

But this was the least of the early public relations advantages Anonymous held over HBGary. Hoglund's e-mail to the effect that the firm should leave the soft impression that Aaron is the one that got them had already been provided to a Bloomberg reporter  who thereafter reached Karen Burke to ask her for comment. Burke told the reporter that she didn't know anything about it. Shortly afterwards, the same reporter was supplied by Anonymous with the e-mail heading, which showed that not only had the e-mail been sent to Burke herself just a couple days prior, but she had even responded to it. Karen was really pissed yesterday when I called again about the email, the reporter noted the next day. She basically hung up on me. That Anonymous operatives were receiving intelligence on their enemies from the media should be indicative of the chummy regard in which the collective was coming to be held by reporters. 

At some point over the next few days, HBGary hired a communication crisis specialist. But by that time, several outlets had already revealed that HBGary Federal, along with the more established contracting firms Palantir and Berico, had sought to provide their combined information war capabilities to private clients, including Bank of America. The nature of those services  including cyber attacks on Wikileaks and a clandestine campaign of harassment against one of that organization's most effective supporters, Glenn Greenwald  were such that Rep. Hank Johnson called for a Congressional investigation. But Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, shot down any such inquiry, announcing that it is the role of the Justice Department to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted.

But as was also shown in the e-mails, it was the Justice Department itself that had originally made the introductions when Bank of America first sought out a firm capable of executing a clandestine disruption of Wikileaks. This did not go unnoticed among the ranks of Anonymous. In fact 