First a little history. HBGary is a technology security company with two distinct – but affiliated – firms carrying the name: HBGary Federal, which sells into the US Federal Government, and HB Gary, Inc. Its clients include information assurance companies, computer emergency response teams, and computer forensic investigators.
The company was founded by Hoglund back in 2003, since when its CEO has made presentations at the Black Hat Briefings, the RSA Conference and a number of other computer security conferences. Infosecurity notes that HBGary has also analyzed the GhostNet and Operation Aurora events.
Last year, Barr – as CEO of HBGary Federal – claimed that he could exploit social media to gather information about hackers. At the start of this year, he then claimed to have used these techniques – using Facebook, IRC and Twitter channels – to infiltrate the Anonymous hacktivist group.
It was also suggested that he planned to release data on the identities of Anonymous members at the ongoing B-Sides series of security conferences, as well as sell that data to agencies such as the FBI.
This went down – as you might expect – rather badly with Anonymous, who hacked the HBGary Federal site in early February, copying tens of thousands of documents and emails from both HBGary Federal and HBGary, Inc, and posting them online. Barr's Twitter account was also compromised.
Some of the data posted showed that HBGary Federal was working on behalf of Bank of America to respond to Wikileaks' planned release of the bank's internal documents and the plan was to 'disrupt' a reporter in his support of Wikileaks, as well as assisting Bank of America's law firm in its ongoing plans.
Hoglund told Infosecurity that he was not impressed with what happened, but he was even less impressed with the reports about his firm that appeared in the media and the blogosphere, which he says were unfair in the way they portrayed his company.
What happened, he said, was not down to his firm's technology, but human error, as HBGary Federal's CEO used the same password on several of his accounts, which is something that Anonymous exploited.
HBGary, he explained, is a relatively small company with some 35 staff and a 10-year record in the IT security industry.
Its products, he said, analyze what is happening with an IT systems' memory and look for malicious behavior on the IT platform. He added that the technology is relatively unique in the marketplace, and that the R&D involved to create this memory/resource analysis technique is a relatively high barrier to anyone seeking to compete with the firms.
So where are the security threats that ITsec professional should be worried about?
Like many in the industry, Hoglund pointed an accusing finger at China for waging a “cold war” against online systems in the US and elsewhere in the West.
He says ITsec professionals need to defend against these state-sponsored attacks, which he predicted will target critical national infrastructure systems such as power grids and the like.