FBI call gives clues into Anonymous, LulzSec probes

At one point during a nearly 17-minute conference call that took place in January between the FBI and Scotland Yard, the moderator - an FBI special agent - suggested that the call will be short in length because fewer than expected people joined.

Little did he know that there was someone else listening. 

The call, which was recorded and subsequently posted Friday on YouTube, involves FBI and Scotland Yard authorities discussing the cases of a number of alleged Anonymous and LulzSec operatives. In total, six people were on the call, but only five introduced themselves. The other was a member of the Anonymous hacking collective, who had managed to infiltrate the call.

The hijacked call began with a member of the FBI's London office, named "Bruce," bantering with "Stewart" of London's Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as Scotland Yard.

Then the conference call's organiser, Timothy Lauster, of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., joined along with a member of the FBI's Los Angeles field office. Another Scotland Yard official was sitting with Stewart.

Stewart updated participants on the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two alleged members of the LulzSec group, which went on a hacking spree last spring and summer, infiltrating companies like Sony and PBS. The Yard rep also discussed wanting to delay the further arrests of two other alleged LulzSec hackers – Tflow and Kayla – to give FBI agents more time to examine Cleary's hard drive. (The real names of Tflow and Kayla were censored in the recording).

"We've got our prosecution counsel making an application in chambers, without defense knowing, to seek a way to try and factor some time that won't look suspicious," he said.

The Yard rep also brought up the case of  the alleged hacker "Tehwongz," a 15-year-old who was arrested in December for launching a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a school and a credit union in the UK. He's the face behind CSLsec (Can't Stop Laughing Security), a supposed three-member offshoot of LulzSec, the official said.

"He's basically just doing all of this for attention and [he's] a bit of an idiot," said the Yard rep, who then added that his team has found writings in which Tehwongz explains how he became a hacker and claims responsibility for breaching the online gaming network Steam.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, said a hacker likely found the email by compromising one of the recipient's email accounts – and then called in themselves to eavesdrop and record the call.

"The assumption has to be that an Anonymous hacker had access to one of the recipients' email accounts, and thus had secret access to the confidential call," Cluley wrote in a blog post.

According to a New York Times report, which quoted an unnamed FBI official, one of the email recipients forwarded the message to his personal email account, which was then accessed by hackers.

In a tweet Friday morning from its flagship account, Anonymous implied it has been intercepting FBI conversation for some time.

The FBI is taking the matter seriously.

"The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained," it said in a statement. "A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible."

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com