25% of hackers in the US are FBI informants

The English Guardian recently published an entertaining research that revealed a curious fact - as it turned out, in the US one of four computer technology experts is an FBI informant.

The Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service used the most effective means — the threat of imprisonment — in order to build a network of scammers among the criminal representatives of the Internet.

The underground world of the Internet is filled with paranoia and disbelief, the newspaper said. This is not surprising, given the number of people named for whom the principles of Omerta are just an empty sound.
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In some cases, illegal forums used by individuals with not the most honest intentions for, say, selling stolen personal data or bank data were created and maintained by those hanging on the hook from the FBI. In other cases, the agents themselves act as carders, receiving moderation rights (or any other control) and, as a result, imprisoning not one or two violators, but whole groups.

Eric Corley, who conducted this study, says that: “A person who has earned himself a serious prison sentence almost always grabs the authorities' proposal, becoming the eyes and ears of the security services. Given the experience that most of them have, they are very vulnerable to intimidation. ”

“This is done for greater interconnection voltages,” notes John Young, owner of Cryptome , a web-based depository for secret documents for WikiLeaks. "There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people whom those people whom they trusted most of all have passed."

The most striking example of this phenomenon is Adrian Lamo , a hacker caught and accused, who turned out to be an informant in the case of Bradley Manning , the main supplier of secret documents to Wikileaks. Manning communicated with Lamo through an ordinary IM-client, moreover - he trusted him, and even asked for advice. Lamo repaid the trust by collecting all the compromising information, and passed a 23-year-old specialist to military ranks. Let me remind you that Manning has been in prison for over a year, and, according to experts, he is waiting for either a life sentence or the death penalty.

For this act, Adrian has already earned the prefix "Judas" and "The most hated hacker of the world", despite his words that he acted "because of the ignorance that someone could harm or kill the publication of thousands of diplomatic and secret papers in WikiLeaks" .

In his last interview, Lamo says: “Obviously, things are not going very well for him now, but for me all this was not a picnic in nature. He followed his mind, and I followed mine. ”

However, the last obstacle for the FBI in the sense of "disturbing the peace" was the group of "hacktivists" who launched several highly effective cyber-attacks solely to make an impression. In the latter case, Lulz Security attacked the InfraGard organization associated with the Bureau. This was a response to news from the Pentagon that “foreign cyber attacks would be regarded as an act of war.”

However, Lulz is far from the only ones, and go on par with the group Anonymous, who attacked the Visa and MasterCard systems in response to blocking donations to WikiLeaks. And if Lulz Security is such a new phenomenon that the FBI will have to deal with them for a long time, then Anonymous is rumored to be under pressure from the Bureau. In January, there were raids on 40 addresses in the United States, and five in the UK, and the California Supreme Court has already received evidence to initiate a federal case.

Kevin Poulsen (Kevin Poulsen, Wired Senior Editor) believes that everything collective is classically vulnerable to penetration and destruction. “We are already seeing how the individual members of Anonymous attack each other and give up their IP addresses. This is the first step towards being controlled by the FBI. ”

Barret Brown (Barret Brown), who served as the speaker for Anonymous, said that he was fully aware of the interest from the Federal Bureau. “The FBI have always been there. Always watched, always in chat rooms. No one ever knows who is an informer and who is not, and this makes us even more vulnerable. ”

It seems that today anonymity is becoming the second method of authentication.

RRW via Guardian