A former hacker who later became an FBI informant organized hundreds of cyberattacks against foreign government websites in 2012 and passed the stolen data to US federal authorities, the New York Times revealed today.
Among the victims of this cyberespionage operation, during which many databases and emails were stolen, were government websites in Iran, Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, and even that of the Polish embassy in Britain, according to the newspaper, which bases its report on court documents and interviews with people involved in the case.
“Although the (court) documents do not state whether the FBI ordered the attacks, they suggest that the (US) government may have used cyber hackers to collect information from abroad,” the publication notes.
At the center of the case is a hacker who, after his arrest, became an FBI informant: this is Hector Javier Monsegur, 30 years old, known by the pseudonym "Sambu", who was a member of the Anonymous group and was accused in December 2010 of stealing credit card data from the websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
Monsegur was facing a 124-year prison sentence for all the crimes he was charged with. However, he cooperated with authorities in their investigation of Anonymous and his sentence was “postponed,” the newspaper comments.
Hector Monsegur was in contact with another Anonymous member, Jeremy Hammond, whom he asked to infiltrate foreign government websites. The list of targets included more than 2,000 addresses.
Once the data was retrieved from these websites, it was sent to a server that was under the control of Monsegur, Hammond revealed in an interview he gave to the newspaper from the prison where he is being held.
According to the documents, Monsegur also convinced other hackers to attack Syrian government websites. “The FBI exploited hackers who wanted to help Syrians fighting the Assad regime and who were in fact unknowingly providing the US government with access to Syrian information systems,” one of the documents obtained by the newspaper states.
Source: newsit.gr
