Security News > 2011 > March > Is This The Girl That Hacked HBGary?

http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/03/16/is-this-the-girl-that-hacked-hbgary/ By Parmy Olson Disruptors Forbes.com March 16, 2011 Next time you see a flock of teenage girls in the mall, note that one of them might be Kayla. As your average 16-year-old, she regularly hangs out with friends, works part time at a salon and hopes one day to be a teacher. Behind the scenes though, she’s a big time supporter of Anonymous, the loosely knit global hacking group that brought down the Web sites of MasterCard and PayPal in defence of WikiLeaks. That’s what she claims at least. Kayla flits around the web with so covert an identity that I cannot fully verify her age or gender. Still, the girl known on chat forums as ‘k, and who spoke to me by e-mail as “Kayla,” is no figment of the Internet’s imagination: she helped all but destroy a company. When Aaron Barr, the now-former CEO of software security firm HBGary Federal, claimed in a press report that he could identify members of the Anonymous collective through social media, she and four other hackers broke into his company’s servers in revenge, defacing his Web site, purging data and posting more than 50,000 of his emails online for the world to see, all within the space of 24 hours. Kayla played a crucial role, posing as HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund to an IT administrator (who happened to be Nokia security specialist Jussi Jaakonaho) to gain access to the company’s servers. Read their email correspondence here and here. In the fallout, Barr’s emails revealed HBGary had proposed a dirty tricks campaign against WikiLeaks to a law firm representing Bank of America. Other security firms distanced themselves. Kayla and her buddies had opened a can of worms. [...]

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http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/03/16/is-this-the-girl-that-hacked-hbgary/