FBI Arrests 14 People Connected to Anonymous PayPal Hacks

By Nicole Henderson,July 20, 2011

The Department of Justice released this notice on Tuesday

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As part of an ongoing investigation, US authorities arrested 16 people on Tuesday in connection to major hacks, including an attack on PayPal last year, according to a report by Reuters.

The arrests come on the heels of a LulzSec attack on Murdoch-owned news sites on Monday.

The FBI arrested 14 people in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio on their alleged involvement in the PayPal hacks, according a press release. Between ages 20 to 42, the accused allegedly conducted the attack on PayPal's website in retaliation for suspending the accounts of WikiLeaks.

In December, the FBI raided a Texas-based web hosting company and seized a computer believed to be involved in the denial of service attacks targeting PayPal.

Charged with conspiracy, the 14 individuals, 11 men and two women, could face a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted. According to the press release, they are also charged with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Each charge carries a $250,000 fine.

The other two arrests were in New Mexico and Florida. In New Mexico, authorities arrested an employee for a contractor for AT&T's wireless service for accessing a computer without authorization. This arrest has been connected to LulzSec, the report says.

The other man was charged with illegally accessing Tampa Bay's Infragard's website and uploading malicious files. Both men are 21-years-old, according to the Telegraph.
In addition, British police arrested one person and Dutch authorities arrested four for cybercrimes related to other recent attacks.

According to the Telegraph, police arrested a  16-year-old in London under the Computer Misuse Act and suspected involvement in both Anonymous and LulzSec. London police arrested a 19-year-old hacker in June as well.

According to a press release by the Department of Justice, more than 75 searches have taken place in the United States as part of the ongoing investigations into these attacks.

With such high-profile targets, including the CIA, US Senate and Arizona law enforcement, and others, many believe it was only a matter of time before authorities tracked down some of the hackers of these groups. However, with the anonymous nature and obvious wide-reach of these groups, it will be difficult for authorities to stop the hacks all together.

To recap the major hacks by LulzSec, take a look at a 50-day timeline here.

  
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FBI Questions Iowa Woman on LulzSec Involvement

By Nicole Henderson,June 29, 2011

FBI questioned Bailey on her involvement with LulzSec

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The FBI raided an Iowa home last week in connection to the LulzSec hacks, according to a report Tuesday on Wired's Threat Level blog.

On Thursday morning FBI agents approached 29-year-old Laurelai Bailey with questions about her connection to the group of hackers responsible for hacking their way through PBS, CIA and several other institutions.
According to the report, the conversation lasted five hours though Bailey says she knew nothing aside from what was already available to the general public.

The agents were particularly interested in a member of LulzSec who goes by the name "Kayla", Wired says. Kayla is a founding member of LulzSec who originally claimed to be a 16-year-old girl, according to the report. Rumors say she is actually a 20-year-old man from New Jersey, although it's not known what her actual identity is.

Wired says the FBI asked Bailey if she could infiltrate the group but she told them it wouldn't work since the hackers held a grudge against her after she leaked logs from a chatroom where they planned an attack.

Bailey says she became close with the hackers through her involvement with Crowdleaks, a news website where she was a reporter.

She was fired from her job in tech support after leaked logs portrayed her as a member of LulzSec and included her real name and contact information.

Agents took Bailey's hard drives, her camera and more computer equipment, according to the report.

Last week, London police arrested a 19-year-old hacker. On Thursday he was let out on bail though his bail conditions include no Internet access, a curfew and he has to wear an electronic tag. He has been charged with five offences under the Criminal Law and Computer Misuse Act and is due to appear in court at the end of August.
At the time of his arrest, many reports speculated he was part of LulzSec but the group denies the allegation.

People in the industry seem to be divided on LulzSec; either they identify with the motivation behind the group or they think there is a better way to go about exposing security vulnerabilities. This week Facebook hired George Hotz, the hacker known for his legal battle with Sony that was settled out of court earlier this year.

Since LulzSec disbanded earlier this week after only 50 days of hacks, it has led many people to suspect that authorities are narrowing in on the members of the group. Though the group has called it quits, the FBI is likely motivated to catch the hackers after being embarrassed by several attacks on government, law enforcement and security sites.

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FBI Scrubs 19,000 PCs Infected by Coreflood Bot Malware

By Justin Lee, June 23, 2011

A graph that shows the number of Coreflood beacons per day

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The FBI told a federal court last week it has scrubbed 19,000 PCs that were previously infected with the Coreflood bot malware, according to a report by Krebs on Security.

The effort comes more than two months after the US Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut was given the go-ahead to seize 29 domain names used in connection to the botnet, as well as to redirect traffic from the botnet's servers over to an FBI controlled-server.

The FBI also received a temporary restraining order that allowed it to send a command to Coreflood-infected PCs that would cease the botnet from operating.

The move is a part of a massive legal campaign that strives to wipe out one of the oldest and most dangerous malware viruses ever created.

Coreflood exploits the Windows operating system to create bot computers, infecting personal computers, larger organizations and businesses when it is downloaded by clicking on a "pop-up" or a link found on an unreliable website.

The malware has infected more than 2 million computers throughout its nearly 10 year existence.

According to the court-filed declaration, which can be viewed here, FBI special agent Kenneth Keller said the agency has sent about 19,000 uninstall commands to 24 identifiable victims in the US whose computers had been infected with the Coreflood malware.

The FBI said that all 24 victims, whom it had their written consent, did not experience any consequences from these uninstall commands, the FBI said.

The FBI has contacted hundreds of identifiable victims, as well as passed along information to about 25 of the largest ISPs in the US so they can alert their infected customers.

"The FBI has also provided information about infected computers to law enforcement agencies overseas," Keller told the court. "While it has not been possible to notify the owner of every infected computer, due in part to the difficulty in identifying the computer owners and obtaining accurate contact information for them, the decline in the size of the Coreflood Botnet is likely attributable in large part to the success of the victim notification efforts."

Keller also said that the FBI no longer needed to operate the substitute server in order to stop defendants from using the Coreflood botnet which are designed to steal private information.

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FBI Confiscates Servers from Swiss Web Host DigitalOne's Virginia Site

By Nicole Henderson, June 22, 2011

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The FBI confiscated three racks of blade servers from a Virginia data center on Tuesday, according to a report by the New York Times.

Switzerland-based hosting company DigitalOne (http://www.digitalone.com/) says the Reston, Va. data center, where it leases space, was raided at 1:15 a.m. The raid affected "tens of clients," according to Digital One chief executive officer Sergej Ostroumow.

Ostroumow told customers in an email that the company could not restart its servers, as the raid took its website offline and its customer support with it.

On Wednesday morning, DigitalOne's website was still unavailable

Other sites affected by the raid included Instapaper, Curbed Network and Pinboard and others, according to the report. Those sites appear to be online on Wednesday morning.
Ostroumow would not disclose which customer he believed to be a target, although the FBI has been on the hunt for hackers with connection to hacker group LulzSec (http://www.lulzsecurity.com/) recently. The FBI did not comment on the operation or its relation to LulzSec.

On Tuesday, a 19-year-old was arrested in connection to the Sony PlayStation Network outage by London police.

Despite DigitalOne providing the information of the target's IP address, the FBI took unrelated servers as well, according to the report.

As a web host that offers shared hosting it can be difficult and costly to ensure other customers stay online when a raid like this occurs.
DigitalOne had no employees on-site during the raid and claims the data center operator told DigitalOne about the raid three hours after it started.

Register reports that the 285,000-square-foot data center is owned and operated by CoreSite.

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Level 3 Provides Content Delivery Network Services for FBI Website

By Justin Lee, February 15, 2011

A screen shot of the FBI's main website

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Content delivery network servies provider Level 3 Communications (www.level3.com) announced on Tuesday it has been awarded a contract to provide CDN services for the FBI's (www.fbi.gov) main website through the agency's prime contract holder Human Touch (www.humantouchllc.com).

The value of the contract has not been disclosed. In 2010, the FBI awarded Human Touch with a $4.9 million, four-year contract to provide technical resources needed to host its new website using a Web 2.0 framework.
Under this contract, Level 3 will provide CDN services to improve the site's performance, including loading content more quickly, improving traffic monitoring and improving security while reducing any related costs.
Level 3 will provide caching services for the website and local home pages for the FBI's 56 field offices throughout the US as well as its website for citizens to report suspected terrorism or criminal activity.
The company says its CDN is designed to help customers control all aspects of the delivery, from start to completion.
Level 3's Internet backbone includes a content delivery platform for a highly scalable system, protecting customer websites from denial-of-service attacks.
The website's private cloud infrastructure ensures that the FBI maintains its private information stored on its server behind the firewall.
"The FBI maintains their data on their own server, they handle their own website creation, and they decide when and what to update," says Edward Morché, senior vice president of federal markets for Level 3. "The public looks to the FBI's website for timely, important information, which is why it is critical for the website to be fast and easy to navigate, easy to manage and cost-effective — and that’s exactly what we delivered."

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