ANONYMOUS PRESS RELEASE
February 7th, 2011

Recently, the head of internet security firm HBGary Federal, Aaron Barr, sought to elevate his investigation of the Anonymous movement by providing the Financial Times with what he claimed to be accurate and useful information about those who allegedly drive our activities.

In yesterday's release we inferred that the information presented was easy to undermine by any of the millions of people around the world with a cursory understanding of internet culture. Not only was the information provided by HBGary Federal woefully inaccurate, it provided no incriminating evidence against any of the persons named.

Today, Anonymous learned that HBGary Federal intended to sell to the FBI a large document (it can be found at http://hizost.com/d/zjb) that allegedly detailed the identities of dozens of our participants.

Within hours of learning this, Anonymous infiltrated HBGary Federal's network and websites. Anonymous acquired the document with supposed personal details of anons, along with 50,000 company e-mails (~4.71GB) - all of which have now been distributed on the internet. Additionally, his associated websites and social media accounts were hijacked and manipulated to stress how poorly this 'security expert' handles matters of his own security (http://imagebin.org/136490). Woe to his clients and others who invested in his confidence.

The lack of quality in Aaron Barr's undertaken research is worth noting. Aaron Barr missed a great deal of information that has been available online, and in fact failed to identify some of those whose identities were never intended to be hidden. People such as DailyKos' diarist blogger Barrett Brown, and the administrator of anonnews.org, joepie91, whose identities could have been found in under a minute with a simple Google search.

It is also worth noting that Aaron Barr was also providing this documentation as an example of investigation protocol. This would introduce a systematic flaw to the FBI's investigative woodwork. The risk of institutionalising a flawed procedure exponentiates a problem, and it does so at the taxpayers expense in every sense. Had the FBI indeed bought this information from HBGary Federal, it would have been paid for by taxpayers money, and many innocent people would have been marked as leaders in actions they may not even have been associated with.

Unlike you, Aaron, we did our research, we know who you are, and now, so will everyone else. Although you have managed to ruin your credibility in an attempt to further it, you did provide us with entertainment, albeit very briefly.

Anonymous does not have leaders. We are not a group, we are not an organization. We are just an idea. What we have done today will appear harsh. It is harsh. We will respond to those who seek to threaten us. We understand that our participants have been concerned about recent FBI raids and companies such as HBGary Federal lurking and logging our chats, so we’ve given all of Anonymous a message: we will fight back.

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us - always.

Yours faithfully,
Anonymous.

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Additional notes for republication:

* A transcript of the e-mails that were exchanged to gain root access to www.rootkit.com can be found here: http://pastie.org/1535735

* An image of the deface that was done on HBGary can be found here: http://imagebin.org/136505

When using this information for further research, please save these resources as they may become unavailable over time due to their sensitive nature.