An attack by Anonymous on security firm HBGary used a combination of software vulnerabilities and social engineering to pull off a highly sophisticated hack, it has emerged.

A brute force dictionary-based attack on these passwords allowed the miscreants to work out the login credentials used by HBGary Federal employees, including chief exec Aaron Barr and COO Ted Vera. Barr and Vera made the mistake of using the same passwords for their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Crucially the same password was also used to administer a corporate email account, a failing seized upon by Anonymous to extract a cache of corporate emails which were subsequently posted as a torrent, exposing confidential emails. The emails, in turn, revealed who had access to the rootkit.com research site maintained by HBGary, and the probable root access password of the machine hosting the site. [see our article on password reuse here]

A detailed analysis of the hack can be found here.

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