14 DAY TRIAL // A few months ago, just before Hector Monsegur, aka the hacker Sabu, was supposed to be sentenced, Jeremy Hammond published a statement in which he revealed that the US government had used the hacktivists to breach into the systems of several foreign governments.
On Friday, Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the cyberattack on Stratfor. However, right before the sentencing, he made another statement in which he provided additional details regarding the attacks on foreign governments ordered by the FBI through Sabu, who at the time was working as an informant for the agency.
Sparrow Media has published Hammond’s statement in full, but Judge Loretta Pleska has ordered that certain parts of it, the ones in which the hacktivist names their targets, be redacted.
However, an uncensored version has also been published online. Apparently, the FBI provided the hacktivists, through Sabu, with a list of websites and zero-day exploits that could be used to breach them.
According to Hammond, a total of over 2,000 websites were breached in January and February 2012. Many of them were the sites of foreign governments such as Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Nigeria, Colombia, Iran, Syria, and Slovenia.
“A few of the compromised websites that I recollect include the official website of the Governor of Puerto Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil, the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the Ministry of Electricity of Iraq,” Hammond noted.
The information stolen from the networks of these organizations was uploaded to servers controlled by the FBI.
The 28-year-old believes the FBI took advantage of the fact that Anonymous wanted to help the people of Syria. Without realizing it, the hackers gave the US government access to useful intelligence information.