Corporate hacker Aaron Barr draws inspiration from Maxim magazine for his fake persona army.
Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained
75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called "Team Themis" had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.
In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump
detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal
floated the idea of using "
fake insider personas" to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to
manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets. Other presentations are more specific and describe efforts to use social media to
hack computers and find vulnerabilities among even the
families of people who work at organizations critical of the Chamber.
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