HBGary Federal Forces Its Former CEO Out of DEFCON Panel

HBGary Federal, an information security company hacked by Anonymous earlier this year, threatens its former CEO Aaron Barr with legal action if he doesn't pull out of a DEFCON panel.

DEFCON is the world's largest hacker conference and takes place every year in Las Vegas. The panel Barr was supposed to speak in is called "'Whoever Fights Monsters...' Aaron Barr, Anonymous, and Ourselves."

According to Threatpost, Barr notified the DEFCON organizers on Wednesday that he was withdrawing after HBGary Federal threatened to file for an injunction.

Barr has not been in good relations with his former employer since his actions led to the company becoming a target for Anonymous back in February.

The former CEO used a pseudonym to infiltrate the group and gather information about its members. He then bragged in the media about his plans to expose the real identities of the hacktivist collective's leaders.

As a result, hackers broke into the company's network and stole the email archives of several senior representatives, including Barr himself. But Anonymous didn't stop there and also targeted HBGary Federal's sister company, HBGary, and its officers.

The hacktivists dumped thousands of the firm's internal and confidential emails on the Internet exposing shady dealings with other federal contractors and a plan to destroy WikiLeaks. The whole thing was a PR disaster for the two companies.

Barr was eventually forced to resign and apparently agreed through his exit papers not to speak publicly about the incident. The company is now using those documents to force his silence.

The panel, which borrows its title from Nietzsche's famous quote "whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," promised a "a gritty and frank (and heated)" discussion about Anonymous, LulzSec, government APTs and ethics.

The others speakers aside from Aaron Barr were Threatpost editor Paul Roberts, Joshua Corman, research director for enterprise security practice at The 451 Group, and Attrition.org's Jericho. It's not clear if the panel will go on without the former HBGary Federal CEO.