14 DAY TRIAL // A plan drafted by three security consultancy companies to attack and discredit WikiLeaks was leaked onto the Internet as a result of a security breach.
The plan is outlined in a confidential presentation called "The WikiLeaks Threat" that was prepared by Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies at the request of Hunton & Williams, a law firm that lists Bank of America among its clients.
At the end of November, in an interview for Forbes, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange announced that the organization's next "megaleak" will target a large US bank.
Based on suspicions that the whistleblower site has the contents of one of its executive's hard drive, Bank of America contracted consultancy firm Booz Allen Hamilton to assess the fallout of a possible leak.
It seems that Hunton & Williams also tried to secure a contract in this sense and as part of its pitch, asked the three technological partners to put together a presentation.
The final version of the presentation was found inside the emails of HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, which were recently stolen and leaked onto the Internet by members of the Anonymous collective.
One of the slides focuses on Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, who in the past wrote favorably of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, the man suspected of leaking the "Collateral Murder" video.
The companies write that "this level of support needs to be disrupted" and that "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold."
Another slide enumerates potential proactive tactics which include discrediting the organization by submitting fake documents and then calling out the error, raising concerns over the security of its infrastructure or funding media campaigns to portray it as reckless.
It even goes as far as to propose "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters" which the firms say "would kill the project."
In the meantime, HBGary tries to minimize the impact of the leak by claiming that some of the data publicly released by Anonymous and attributed to them was falsified. According to The Tech Herald, this has enraged members of the hacktivist group even more.