14 DAY TRIAL // After leaking millions of pieces of information from the systems of organizations from all over the world, Team GhostShell has become the target of several law enforcement agencies. In an interview we’ve had with DeadMellox, the leader of the group, he has detailed some of his encounters with the authorities.
DeadMellox says he’s taking a break from hacking for an undetermined period of time, but before doing so, he has shared with us some interesting things from behind the scenes of his collective’s operations.
Here’s what DeadMellox told us about his encounters with law enforcement. The complete interview will be published in the upcoming days.
“As you know already, I like sometimes to play tricks on law enforcement agencies. One of them this year was related to Twitter. When the year started I released ‘private’ conversations between multiple accounts affiliated with Team GhostShell via direct messages.
It contained names and specific locations. In the very same month, I was contacted on IRC about every single last one of them.
For those that aren't familiar with the scene here, if you look up almost every single public complaint file from the FBI on arrested hacktivists, you will see that one of the very first things they do is spy on you, whether it's through these direct messages on Twitter or any other social platform from the US.
It's quite interesting how they don't even try to hide it, so from the very beginning I went with the idea that any conversation there would go to them, that's why this year I wanted to put it to the test and experience it myself.
They're really something else, very different from a regular informant that would normally just try to social engineer you. Agents in general will use another technique, called elicitation. The purpose of it is to mimic everyday small talk and get you to reveal sensitive bits of information without you even realizing it.
They're terrible at it, but it was really a fun experience. From what I could tell, a few of the things they wanted to find about was: 1) If the person they're talking to is really me. 2) How many members are in TGS. 3) What's my relation with the Chinese. 4) If I engage in unethical activities like carding.
The ironic part here is that I ended up learning more about them, than they about me. I've documented myself since the 1st of January 2012 including my encounter with all these sorts of users and they all seem really easy to manipulate, I'm quite disappointed actually.
Their phishing attempts on my public email address weren't that good either. Even though they had parked domains that bounced off ISP's every 10 minutes, I could still pin-point them with the help of a DNS tree.”