Skip to main content

Anonymous releases 71,800 HBGary e-mails through new site

hbgaryAny companies out there considering taking down Anonymous in return for the various DDoS attacks the group staged earlier this year might want to think twice. The hacktivist group recently infiltrated security firm HBGary Federal’s network and accumulated various confidential material and internal e-mails. The firm’s CEO Aaron Barr allegedly had plans to rat out Anonymous members to the FBI, and as revenge he can now find his and various other HBGary employees’ e-mails publicly posted (HBGary is HBGary Federal’s sister company). In addition to outing Anonymous members, HBGary was one of the handful of firms orchestrating an image attack to destroy WikiLeaks’ reputation. WikiLeaks is reportedly preparing to release confidential documents belonging to Bank of America, and according to Forbes, HBGary would work for the company by “spreading misinformation, launching cyberattacks against [WikiLeaks], and pressuring journalists.”

Anonymous is now hosting a site (and there are a variety of mirrors as well) giving anyone access to 71,800 e-mails from the inboxes of HBGary executives Greg Hogland, Aaron Barr, Ted Vera, and Phil Wallisch. Subject matter ranges from a PowerPoint presentation detailing intentions to plant false stories about WikiLeaks to embarrassing love letters between company execs.

This is more than humiliating for HBGary – it’s financially ruining the company. Security firms Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies have cut ties with HBGary. The released documents tied both firms to the operations defending Bank of America by sabotaging WikiLeaks, and now they’re wiping their hands of the situation. Aside from any business relationships Anonymous’ latest hack and release damaged for HBGary, the fact that a security firm was infiltrated by the group in the first place speaks volumes.

WikiLeaks holds powerful information, and it seems like security firms will stop at nothing to retain it – or at least threaten the group and its supporters to the point of keeping their mouths shut. But it appears that Anonymous has more in its arsenal than unsophisticated DDoS attacks, and the group is ready to use them.

Molly McHugh
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…
Google might finally have an answer to Chat GPT-4
ChatGPT versus Google on smartphones.

Google has announced the launch of its most extensive artificial intelligence model, Gemini, and it features three versions: Gemini Ultra, the largest and most capable; Gemini Pro, which is versatile across various tasks; and Gemini Nano, designed for specific tasks and mobile devices. The plan is to license Gemini to customers through Google Cloud for use in their applications, in a challenge to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Gemini Ultra excels in massive multitask language understanding, outperforming human experts across subjects like math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics. It's expected to power Google products like Bard chatbot and Search Generative Experience. Google aims to monetize AI and plans to offer Gemini Pro through its cloud services.

Read more
AMD is taking the gloves off in the AI arms race
AMD's CEO presenting the MI300X AI GPU.

AMD looks ready to fight. At its Advancing AI event, the company finally launched its Instinct MI300X AI GPU, which we first heard about first a few months ago. The exciting development is the performance AMD is claiming compared to the green AI elephant in the room: Nvidia.

Spec-for-spec, AMD claims the MI300X beats Nvidia's H100 AI GPU in memory capacity and memory bandwidth, and it's capable of 1.3 times the theoretical performance of H100 in FP8 and FP16 operations. AMD showed this off with two Large Language Models (LLMs) using a medium and large kernel. The MI300X showed between a 1.1x and 1.2x improvement compared to the H100.

Read more
AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren’t all that new
AMD revealing its Ryzen 8040 CPUs.

AMD new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren't as new as they seem. During its Advancing AI event, AMD announced that Ryzen 8040 chips are coming to laptops, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a new generation of processors. AMD doesn't call them next-gen CPUs, rather referring to them as "the next step in personal AI processing." And that's because these aren't next-gen CPUs.

Ryzen 8040 mobile chips will replace Ryzen 7040 mobile chips, and based on that fact alone, it's easy to assume that the Ryzen 8040 CPUs are better. They have a higher number! From what AMD has shared so far, though, these supposedly new chips look like nothing more than a rebrand of the CPUs already available in laptops. AMD set itself up for this type of confusing, misleading situation, too.
New name, old cores
First, how do we really know these are just rebranded Ryzen 7040 chips? I've included the full product stack below that spells it out. These chips, code-named Hawk Point, are using AMD's Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU cores, which the previous-generation Phoenix CPUs also used. There's also the NPU, which I'll circle back to in a moment.

Read more