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Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison just for 'Re-Sharing Link to Hacked Material'

Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison just for 'Re-Sharing Link to Hacked Material'

Jan 23, 2015
Barrett Brown , a journalist formerly served as an unofficial spokesman for the hacktivist collective Anonymous , was sentenced Thursday to over five years in prison, after pleading guilty to federal charges of  " transmitting a threat in interstate commerce ,"   " for interfering with the execution of a search warrant ," and to being " accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer ." After already having served over 2 years ( 31 months ) in detention, Texas court in Dallas has sentenced Barrett Brown to 63 months in federal prison and also ordered him to pay a little more than $890,000 in restitution and fines related to the 2011 hack of Stratfor Global Intelligence . Over a year ago, another federal judge sentenced Anonymous member Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for making millions of emails from the servers of security firm Stratfor public. It's Hammond who said that Brown simply linked to the hacked
US Prosecutor drops Criminal charges against Barrett Brown

US Prosecutor drops Criminal charges against Barrett Brown

Mar 07, 2014
U.S. Prosecutors decided not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown , and dismiss a majority of charges related to sharing a link to a dump of credit card numbers connected to the breach of intelligence firm Stratfor. Supporters say Brown just copied the hyperlink from an the Internet chat room and then reposted the link on his own internet chat room, Project PM , that linked to stolen documents from the US government contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence , included 860,000 e-mail addresses for Stratfor subscribers and 60,000 credit card details. Just hours after Brown's lawyers filed their comprehensive argument, the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss all 11 charges, on Thursday.  Apart from computer fraud charges, Brown is also facing prosecution for allegedly threatening an FBI agent and for alleged obstruction of justice. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , a non-profit organization defending civil libertie
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Hacker fined with $183,000 for just one-Minute of DDoS attack

Hacker fined with $183,000 for just one-Minute of DDoS attack

Dec 12, 2013
Eric Rosol , A  38-year-old hacker who joined an Anonymous hacker attack for just one minute has been sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay $183,000 fine. Yes you read right! $183,000 fine  for just 1 Minute of DDoS attack. In 2011, Eric participated in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack organized by hacker collective Anonymous against the servers of Koch Industries. The DDoS attack was organized in opposition to Koch Industries' reported weakening of trade unions. He used a software called a Low Orbit Ion Cannon Code , LOIC is a popular DDoS tool used by anonymous hackers and other hackers to perform the DDoS attack. Rosol pleaded guilty and was agreed to direct pay for the losses as a result of the attack on the company website i.e. around $5,000 only, but Koch Industries had argued that it hired a consulting group to protect its web sites at a cost of approximately $183,000. Unfortunately, the company website was knocked offline for just 15
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Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond pleads guilty to Stratfor attack, could face 10 years in prison

LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond pleads guilty to Stratfor attack, could face 10 years in prison

May 28, 2013
A computer hacker linked to the group known as Anonymous and LulzSec  pleaded guilty on Tuesday to breaking into Stratfor , a global intelligence company.  Hammond, 28, was arrested last March and charged with hacking into the computers of Stratfor. Jeremy Hammond and other members of AntiSec , stole confidential information, defaced websites and temporarily put some victims out of business. Authorities say their crimes affected more than 1 million people. Hammond was charged under the controversial 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law used to charge the late Aaron Swartz and other cyber-activists. The plea agreement could carry a sentence of as much as 10 years in prison, as well as millions of dollars in restitution payments, though Hammond's official sentence won't be handed down until September. Beyond Stratfor, Hammond took responsibility for eight other hacks, all of which involved either law enforcement, intelligence firms or defense contractor webs
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