Over the years myself and others have written diary after diary about Private Banks/Companies conspiring to take on its critics, protestors & competitors with the help of government aligned agencies. The HBGary/Greenwald emails provide a quick summary:
Still, the leaked emails are turning up some gems, with a key one being that Bank of America (widely discussed as Wikileaks' next target) had apparently been talking to HBGary Federal about how to disrupt Wikileaks. That link, from The Tech Herald, includes tons of details. The full proposal (embedded below) feels like something straight out of a (really, really bad) Hollywood script.
It appears that the law firm BofA was using as a part of its Wikileaks crisis response task force, Hunton and Williams, had reached out to firms asking for research and a plan against Wikileaks. HBGary Federal, along with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies put together their pitch. According to the emails discussing this, the firms tried to come up with a plan as to how they could somehow disrupt Wikileaks , see if there was a way to sue Wikileaks and get an injunction against releasing the data.
There are two key slides in the presentation. The first is a totally bizarre plan of attack on Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been an outspoken supporter of Wikileaks. However, these three companies seem to think that they can pressure him to give up supporting Wikileaks in this case and that will somehow solve a big part of the issue.
The public attention to this kind of radical/unethical behavior quickly had the big banksters pull the plug on the plan. Well.... until recently:
FBI Probing 'Revenge Hacks' By Banks on Cyber Attackers
The FBI is investigating whether any U.S. banks were behind a "retaliatory" cyber attack on an Iranian computer network believed to be the launching pad for a 2013 attack on bank websites, Bloomberg reported this week.
Bloomberg didn't identify any specific financial institution being investigated by the FBI, but did say its unnamed sources claimed that JP Morgan executives "advocated such a move in a closed meeting in February 2013."
Now with all the obvious dangers of meddling with the computer systems in a country that could take such aggression as an act of war... one could be glad that 'no action was ever taken'.
However...:
Bloomberg said that private-sector companies in the crosshairs of global hackers are beginning to "push the limits of existing law to consider ways to break into hackers' networks to retrieve stolen data or even knock computers offline to stop attacks."
"Some companies are enlisting cybersecurity firms, many with military or government security ties, to walk them through options for disrupting hacker operations or peering into foreign networks to find out what intellectual property hackers may have stolen," the news service reported.
Retaliatory, extra-legal strikes by companies which have been hacked against their attackers may already be happening, according to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. The Congressman told Bloomberg that "[s]ome victim companies may be conducting offensive operations 'without getting permission' from the federal government."
5:25 AM PT: More from the Yahoo:
It's reported that JP Morgan proposed to the FBI that the bank work from offshore locations to disable the servers used to launch denial of service attacks against its website. But attendees of the meeting dismissed the idea over concerns of its legality.
Despite ruling out the proposed hack, Bloomberg reports that US investigators found that a third party had carried out the attack after all. Now, the FBI is investigating whether US companies broke the law in ordering the hack against the Iranian servers.