14 DAY TRIAL // Unsealed court documents reveal that Hector Xavier Monsegur (also known as Sabu) of the LulzSec hacker group recruited hackers still at large for breaking into foreign websites, from a specific list.
Sabu recruited Jeremy Hammond, who was at the top of the list of FBI’s most wanted hackers, and told him to break into several dozen websites, some of them under the administration of the Turkish government.
After finding a way in, Hammond was instructed to pass the details to politically motivated Turkish hacker group RedHack.
In order to hack into the official websites, Hammond leveraged a zero-day for Plesk, a web publishing platform all of the marks provided by Monsegur were operating on.
The conversation between the two has been disclosed by the Daily Dot, which is in possession of sealed court documents containing about 3GB of chatroom logs and surveillance records. The current information has not been made public until now by order of a federal judge.
After RedHack received the details for hacking into the websites, they proceeded to access servers and retrieve confidential emails, as well as deface the official online locations.
According to the Daily Dot, not all websites provided by Monsegur were attacked by RedHack, since some of them lacked political relevance.
Although the FBI did not confirm that they were aware of the numerous acts of cybercrime Monsegur instigated other hackers to, before Hammod’s final court appearance, his lawyers asked:
“Why was our government, which presumably controlled Mr. Monsegur during this period, using Jeremy Hammond to collect information regarding the vulnerabilities of foreign government websites and in some cases, disabling them?”
However, it appears that Monsegur was under close supervision, as the authorities had his computer bugged with spyware for tracking online activities and had also installed a surveillance camera in his apartment.
Hammond was arrested about two months after the aforementioned attacks and was sentenced in November 2013 to 10 years in a US federal prison for hacking into Stratfor and making public the information he had found.
“I broke into numerous websites he supplied, uploaded the stolen email accounts and databases onto Sabu’s FBI server, and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu and, by extension, his FBI handlers, to control these targets,” Hammond said at his sentencing.
Hector Xavier Monsegur, arrested in June 2011, served seven months in prison and was free while waiting for the sentencing. In May 2014 he was given “time served” for his cooperation with the FBI and received one year of parole.
