14 DAY TRIAL // Jeremy Hammond, 29, the hacker with a key role in breaking into the computer systems of Stratfor security intelligence company back in 2011, thinks that the weak password guarding access to his encrypted laptop permitted authorities to find incriminating evidence about his activities.
Hammond is currently in custody at Manchester Federal Prison in Kentucky, as a result of Hector Monsegur's cooperation with the FBI. Monsegur, a hacker himself, was known online as Sabu and coordinated the activity of the LulzSec outfit; after getting caught by the authorities he turned informant and helped them catch other hackers.
Top priority during the raid: closing the laptop lid
Known online under the alias Anarchaos, Hammond was arrested (currently serving a 10-year sentence) at his home in 2012 for the Stratfor incident, which resulted in the leak of massive amounts of confidential information consisting of emails between the company and its clients.
Additional data spilled online included credit card information, which had been stored in plain text, from a client list which had Northrop Grumann, the Marine Corps and Time Warner Cable on it. The US Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department were also Stratfor clients at the time.
According to a profile from the Associated Press, at the time of the arrest, the 29-year-old was chatting with some friends in the kitchen of his apartment in Chicago when the front door was kicked in and a flash bang was thrown.
Although everyone else’s reaction was to hit the floor, Hammond had other concerns, such as protecting access to his computer. His response to the flash bang was to dart to the bedroom and close the lid of the laptop, which would trigger the encryption of all the data on the storage device.
In encrypted state, information on the hard drive could be accessed only by providing the security password. This could be obtained through cracking, but it would take too long to complete in the case of strong countersigns.
The cat is not to blame
However, Hammond’s was a weak password that could have been cracked in no time, based on a dictionary containing words related to his life and interests.
“My password was really weak,” he said. His string of choice for protecting data on the laptop was “Chewie 123.” This was the name of his cat followed by the most ubiquitous numbers found in passwords. The hacker is to be released in 2020.
A password cracking algorithm would try out this combination in the first attempts to produce a match for the countersign’s hash.
Passwords need to be as strong as possible in order to avoid cracking them with automated tools. Cybercriminals have built large dictionaries for this purpose and sometimes rely on powerful cloud computing to reveal the string of characters corresponding to stolen hashes. Of course, this would work only if salt is not applied.