Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

Forces Support Group (SFSG), men drawn from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment (1 PARA), the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment. Task Force Black operated from the so-called ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad at a base known simply as ‘the Station’.

The three other units in TF-88 were Task Force Green, a contingent from the American 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment (Delta Force); Task Force Blue, US Navy SEALs from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), more commonly known as SEAL Team 6, and Task Force Orange, a team of signal intelligence analysts from the United States Army Intelligence Support Activity (USAISA or just ISA), part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

TF-88 had air support provided by the American 24th Special Tactics Squadron, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) and UK aircraft from both 7 and 47 Royal Air Force Squadrons. Intelligence collection was the responsibility of the American military, working with the British Joint Support Group (JSG – see Cyberstrike: London), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR – see Cyberstrike: London) as well as specialist operators from 18 UK Special Forces Signals Regiment.

Task Force Black left Iraq in 2009 when British forces withdrew from the country and was later redeployed to Afghanistan.

Anonymous

This loose but highly coordinated hacker collective – for want of a better term – has been around for about two decades, but first came to public attention in 2007 when the Canadian media announced that a fifty-three-year-old suspected paedophile had been arrested by the police after having been identified and located by a so-called ‘Internet vigilante group’ named Anonymous.

The group is unusual in that it is both unstructured and decentralised but highly coordinated. It is also very open and public about its plans and uses social media to invite anybody interested to join in and help carry them out. There is no leader or central control, just a widely dispersed collective of people who jointly decide what to do and how and when to do it, and then get on with the job. One of the members of Anonymous described what they did in the pithy – but undeniably accurate – phrase ‘ultra-coordinated motherfuckery’. Anonymous tends to pick targets that it sees as acting against the interests of the general public, of repressing freedom of speech, of trying to control the Internet and, especially more recently, of political ‘Big Brother’ measures.

This is far from a comprehensive list, but since 2007 the group has been involved in attacks on, in no particular order, the Church of Scientology, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Bank of America, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, the Government of Zimbabwe, the Government of Tunisia, the Los Zetas drug cartel and an American computer security firm named HBGary Federal.

In February 2011 a man named Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary Federal, made a catastrophic mistake. He told the media that his company had successfully infiltrated the loose collective of hackers known as Anonymous and would publicly promulgate the information that had been obtained. He had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself into.

In response, Anonymous very quickly hacked into and took over the HBGary Federal website, posting an explicit message that refuted Barr’s claims of infiltration and mocked the ability and professionalism of the alleged ‘computer security’ experts the firm claimed to employ.

That’s the polite way of putting it. Anonymous actually described them as a ‘pathetic gathering of media-whoring money-grabbing sycophants’, which seemed to express the group’s opinion clearly enough. And then Anonymous used the Internet to publish almost 70,000 messages, memoranda and other private and sensitive material from the company files.

This caused more than just severe embarrassment, because the information included offers by HBGary Federal to illegally target journalists and other people for the firm’s clients and, most embarrassing of all, Aaron Barr’s suggestion that he might log into various teen-centric Internet chat rooms while posing as ‘Naughty Vicky’, a highly sexed sixteen-year-old girl. Anonymous also hacked into Barr’s Twitter account, which allowed them to publish his home address and Social Security number.

Within a month, HBGary Federal’s credibility had been utterly destroyed, a congressional committee had been tasked with mounting an investigation into what were seen as inappropriate and potentially illegal contracts entered into by the company, and Barr himself had been forced to resign.

The final message from Anonymous on the hacked company website seemed a reasonable summary of what had happened. It said: ‘It would seem the security experts are not expertly secured. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.’

Donald Trump and the US Federal Depository Library website

In January 2020 the home page of the website of the US Federal Depository Library Program was defaced by a face. In this case, it was the bloodied face of Donald Trump being punched by a fist emerging from the green sleeve of a jacket that bore what looked like the insignia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. The image also included two gold-coloured missiles, each marked with the Iranian flag, and photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader. Text left on the site claimed that the ‘Iran Cyber Security Group Hackers’ had been responsible for the hack and stated that what they had achieved was ‘only a small part of Iran’s cyber ability’.

This hack occurred after an important Iranian military figure and leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Major General Qasem Soleimani, had been killed in Baghdad by an American drone strike. The defaced site also warned that ‘severe revenge awaits those criminals who have tainted their filthy hands with (Soleimani’s) blood and the blood of the other martyrs’.

In hacking terms, this website was a soft target as it allowed free and unrestricted access for the American public to view federal government information, so getting inside wouldn’t have been difficult, though breaching the internal security systems to access the code running the site certainly should have been.

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