I was disheartened to read about the 22 September arrest of alleged LulzSec/Anonymous member Cody Kretsinger (known by the handle ‘recursion’) by the FBI as a suspect in the SQL injection attacks on multiple Sony websites. Note that I was not sad to see the good guys bust a cybercriminal, but I was sad to see a nice guy I had met and talked to briefly at BlackHat Las Vegas 2011 turn out to be a suspect wanted by the FBI.
Cody Kretsinger, second from right, at BlackHat 2011
One of the things we at Cisco try to do is reach out to those studying infosec and wanting to make a career in security. At BlackHat Cisco had a contest where the winner got a Pwnie Express PWN Phone, effectively a modified Nokia N900 with some pentesting software loaded. A group of guys, volunteers with the show from an IT school, were fascinated by the PWN Phone – possibly because in their circle a couple of them had Nokia N900s, a device relatively unknown in North America but somewhat popular in certain hacking circles due to the fact that its OS is Linux-based and thus can be made to run things like metasploit (like the PWN Phone does).
Tags: Anonymous, cyber crime, FBI, hacking, LulzSec, Proxy, security
