FBI Controls One Quarter Of All US Hackers, Says Expert

A quarter of all the hackers in the US are being controlled by the FBI, according to Eric Corley, publisher of the 2600 hacker quarterly.

Corley told The Guardian that the US federal agency is using coercion to force hackers to become informants. “Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation,” Corley told the newspaper.

Infiltration And Collaboration

Rather than arrest hackers, the FBI has decided to infiltrate their ranks and forums. In some cases, it is believed that agents have taken over the management of crime forums to access incriminating information. This has led to numerous arrests and further “recruitment” of informants or, in many cases, imprisonment.

The prima facie case is the relationship between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning over the WikiLeaks memos. Manning was the US soldier who managed to download the thousands of emails and messages that led to the leaks made public by Julian Assange.

Manning trusted Lamo, a convicted hacker, and asked for his advice about the messages. It is believed that Lamo was already under the control of the FBI and he informed them of the intelligence specialist’s wrongdoing. This has resulted in Manning’s year-long incarceration by the US military without trial.

The FBI’s current targets are hacktivist groups such as the Anonymous Operation and Lulz Security. Anonymous members would be difficult to trace because of the informal structure of the organisation. Many of the operatives are lone wolves who join in with denial of service attacks according to their whims and beliefs.

Tales Of Cracks And Craics

Despite the fragmented nature of Anonymous, or perhaps because of it, there appear to be cracks in the group’s structure that are creating divisions. There is a danger that this will give rise to multiple factions following their own tenets and battling the world and each other with renewed venom.

LulzSec is a different kind of operation. A tightly-knitted group, or perhaps an individual, who strike with no discernable pattern wherever they find a loophole. Sony has been their main target but lulz (a fake acronym that stands for the plural of lol – laugh out loud) gives a clue to the fact that they are in the game for kicks, not profit.

The FBI can only hope that, by infiltrating the hackerverse with informants, the identities of the hacktivists will be revealed.

The whole affair makes The Matrix movie seem like a precursor to real life with be-suited agents tracking down non-conformists who threaten to destroy their world.