What we learned from Anonymous

This just in: It appears that calling yourself Anonymous doesn’t make it so and calling your colleagues “brothers” doesn’t make them family.

Yesterday, the Anonowalls came tumbling down as the feds arrested six people it labels the “principal members” of Anonymous and LulzSec. You can bet the folks at HBGary, Sony, PayPal, the Church of Scientology, and the many other victims of Anonymous are off somewhere drinking champagne at this moment.

[ Anonymous may be down for the count, but organizations need to keep up their defenses, as Stratfor Global and Heartland Institute can attest. | For a humorous take on the tech industry’s shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

This is hardly the first time the Anons have heard the battering ram at the door. After 14 members were arrested last July, the hacktivist collective issued the following statement, long on bravado if short on specifics:

Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can possibly to do make us stop.

The problem with that logic: You don’t need to arrest an idea. You just need to arrest those who are spreading the idea, especially if the method they use to spread the idea violates federal laws. And once that idea — er, person is arrested, he very well might roll over and turn snitch.

Such as it is with Hector Xavier Monsegur, better known to Netizens as “Sabu,” one of the alleged ringleaders of Anonymous and its LulzSec offshoot. After receiving a surprise visit from the G-men in June 2011, Sabu saw the writing on the prison wall and decided to cooperate in taking down his colleagues.

(What’s ironic here is that the whole “you can’t arrest an idea” response came a month after Sabu had his come-to-Jesus meeting with the feds. That’s gotta burn.)

Ars Technica has a fascinating story of how the feds took down one of Sabu’s alleged co-conspirators, Jeremy Hammond — aka “anarchaos,” “sup_g,” burn,” “yohoho,” “POW” “tylerknowsthis” and “crediblethreat” — by piecing together disparate facts associated with his various hacker handles.

Interestingly, the feds sat by and watched as Hammond pwned Stratfor, the “global intelligence agency” that is perhaps not quite as sinister and powerful as originally reported here and elsewhere, posted thousands of its subscribers’ credit card numbers online, and spent half a million of its dollars on charitable donations. I’m guessing the FBI does not have much use for Stratfor.

Anonymous responded to the arrests by hacking the website of antivirus vendor Panda Security and posting a bitter diatribe that read in part:

Yeah yeah, we know, Sabu snitched on us. As usually happens FBI menaced him to take his sons away. We understand, but we were your family too. (Remember what you liked to say?)… It’s sad and we can’t imagine how it feels having to look at the mirror each morning and see there the guy who shopped their friends to police.

Does this mean the Anonymous movement is dead? No. But I wouldn’t bet on any spectacular hacking response to these arrests. If I were a “brother” of Sabu’s, I’d be taking a long vacation from my keyboard. Perhaps new hackers will rise to take the place of Sabu and anarchaos — until they get arrested.

Fact is, most of the Anons were not exactly hacking masterminds. Some exploited well-established vulnerabilities that should have been patched but weren’t. The others were just script kiddies. But you might well argue that Anonymous has done a service to the corporate community by proving, at relatively low cost to most of them, how insecure and shoddy their practices really are.

Good-bye for now, Anonymous. I’ll miss you, if for no other reason than your exploits make for excellent blog fodder. As for the rest of the InterWebs? Probably not so much.

Is Anonymous really dead? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “What we learned from Anonymous,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.