14 DAY TRIAL // HBGary, the company whose confidential emails were recently leaked by members of the Anonymous collective, denies any involvement in the drafting of a controversial anti-Wikileaks proposal.
Two weeks ago, after HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr bragged in the media about discovering the real identities of Anonymous' leaders, members of the activist movement hacked into the company's systems.
The hackers managed to extract tens of thousands of corporate emails and leaked them onto the Internet for the entire world to see.
One of the emails contained a slideshow presentation on how to discredit and potentially destroy Wikileaks, prepared by HBGary Federal in collaboration with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies for Bank of America.
The presentation made some pretty bold and potentially illegal proposals including intimidating pro-Wikileaks journalists and even launching cyber attacks against the whistleblower websites's infrastructure.
But Anonymous' hack also extended to HBGary, Inc., a related company which owns a 15% stake in Aaron Barr's HBGary Federal.
In a statement posted on hbgary.com, the company's founder and CEO Greg Hoglund, who also had his emails leaked, wrote:
"With regard to some of the information that came to light as a result of the publishing of stolen information, I want to assure you that your HBGary team did not participate in the development of the proposals that have been the focus of media attention.
"As most of you know, HBGary, Inc. and HBGary Federal are separate companies and have different management. The media confusion around this point has been unfortunate and we have been working diligently to correct it."
The statement has since been taken down from the website for some reason, but it is still accessible in Google's cache at the time of writing this article.
In addition, Mr. Hoglund stressed that the source code of HBGary's computer forensics and malware analysis products has not been affected because its development network is isolated from other systems.
