"Over the last two weeks, my company, Unveillance, has been the target of a sophisticated group of hackers now identified as “LulzSec.” During this two week period, I was personally contacted by several members of this group who made threats against me and my company to try to obtain money as well as to force me into revealing sensitive data about my botnet intelligence that would have put many other businesses, government agencies, and individuals at risk of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.In spite of these threats, I refused to pay off LulzSec or to supply them with access to this sensitive botnet information. Had we agreed to provide this data to them, LulzSec would have been able to grow the size and scope of their DDoS attack and fraud capabilities."
LulzSec posted a response on Pastebin to Karim's statement:
"RE: http://www.unveillance.com/latest-news/unveillance-official-statement/ - whitehat morons
From: http://lulzsecurity.com/ - masters of the seven proxseas
Dear Karim & Unveillance,
Greetings morons. We're writing in response to your recent press statement, which, while blatantly trying to hide your incompetence, attempts to paint an ill-conceived picture on The Lulz Boat. To clarify, we were never going to extort anything from you. We were simply going to pressure you into a position where you could be willing to give us money for our silence, and then expose you publicly.
Ironically, despite the fact that you A) claimed that you wouldn't do something like that, and B) foolishly got outsmarted yet again, we'd like to point out something that you did do: attempt to cooperate with mystery hackers in order to radically, and illegally, boost your company from the ground.
Karim, founder of Unveillance, attempted from the start to work with us for his own gain, and he even offered us payment for certain "tasks". These tasks, hardly subtle at this point, were those of a malicious nature; destroying Karim's competitors through insider info and holes Karim would supply us.
Karim also wanted us to help track "enemy" botnets and "enemy" botnet trackers. All in return for our silence and "mutual gain".
While it's normal for him to try and cover up this embarrassment by putting all the focus back on us, we can, again, see past this primitive social engineering. Karim compromised his entire company and the personal lives of his colleagues, then attempted to silence us with promises of financial gain and mutual benefits.
We don't need cleverly-crafted media spinning to cover up anything, we say it how it is, nice and loud: Karim is a giant fuckwit that used the same password for all of his online accounts and all accounts linked to a company he owns. Then he tried to bargain with hackers so his company wouldn't crumble.Try harder, Karim. We're too smart for your silly games.To everyone else: stay safe, secure yourself, the Internet is a playground for people like us. We love you."
This problem bedevils most individuals where they use the same password across many websites including unprotected websites like Facebook and Linkedin. Hackers only have to compromise one unprotected website to be able to access others. The only real solution to this problem is to have multiple passwords for all different sites and that leads to password fatigue. An alternative is for institutions to have dynamic passwords for their sites by using two-factor authentication and require logins that employ mutual authentication via challenge-response.
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