Posts for: #Info

Dear my “brother” Sabu

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Dear my "brother" Sabu.

Greetings from the real world. You know, where cause and consequence
reign free and mighty.  I'll send you a postcard sometime. Anyway... How
is being a human bidet for the FBI treating you? The very people you
taught the young and impressionable to hate.  I heard you now have a job
as a security consultant? That sounds fun. Life is looking pretty cosy
for you currently. Hey, talking of cosy; It's Jeremy Hammonds birthday
soon, January the 8th. I was considering sending him book or something
because, from experience, jail isn't too cosy and he could do with
things to do to pass the time. After all, 10 years is a hell of a stint
for jail, paedophiles and rapists get less.

Do you remember Jeremy at all? He's one of the people you set up and
sold out to save yourself. But enough about Jeremy, let's talk about you
Hector. I can tell you love talking about good old Sabu lately after
all.

I must admit that after the initial sting at the realisation of what you
did over our time spent communicating, I haven't thought about you much.
I feel a strong sense of injustice over what happened and the way things
went, but as a general rule it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'.
But then you started popping up on my time line - 'Sabu has attended
VICE as a VIP.' ' Sabu is doing an interview for CBS news.' 'Sabu speaks
about his days of hacking for CNET.'  You get the point.

So I watch, and I have to be honest, even though you did what you did I
was still kind of half expecting a show of remorse or even an acceptance
for what you did. Something, anything. But it was like wishing from
blood from a stone. You tried to rationalise what you did and you
outright lied. You flaunt yourself on TV making yourself out to be some
kind of modern day hero, asking who will guard the guards and various
other bullshit. Let's not forget Hector, we had to endure your bullshit
for a long time and we know exactly what you are.

Remember the time Jake and Mustafa wanted to walk away? You knew Jake
was young as you had spoken to him numerous times via voice chat. It was
too much and they didn't want to be a part of it any more. But Big-Bad
Sabu came out and you raged at them in IRC. I asked you to back off them
but you wouldn't, and so Jake and Mustafa stayed around longer than they
wanted and got deeper than they had ever intended. You actively pulled
children back into a world of crime to continue something they didn't
even want to do. You are a bully and a criminal and the only person who
was caught who hasn't paid a sufficient price for what you did. You were
the worst of all of us. The knowledge  you lacked in technical ability
you made up for in manipulation and a big loud mouth with the ability to
coax people into doing things. Using your online persona and charismatic
ways to adjust peoples view on things to what you were trying to spin at
the time. Pure peer pressure. Nobody, especially the children you
dragged in, could say no to you or you would attempt to scare them. 

You were caught but instead of taking responsibility, you bent over and
let the FBI take turns at riding you out. "Mastermind" (I laugh every
time.) you are not, but a manipulating conductor of targets and
(admittedly) persuasive and entirely convincing social engineer you are.  
Jeremy and I were mostly happy exploring and reporting exploits if you
remember correctly. Sure, we had some lulz along the way, but who's idea
was it to go for big targets for pure self gain? Credit cards, the
dumping of personal information, ruining of lives. This was all on the
Great Sabu. Is this what masterminding a group is? Just telling people
to be bigger shits than they need to be on the Internet but doing non of
it himself? Backing people into corners and claiming you had a hand in
any of it other than setting people up to do your dirty work.
The only thing you masterminded was your own freedom by coercing and
manipulating Jeremy and I into doing things you couldn't do. You
manufactured these scenarios and targets to make us look like bigger
threats than we ever were or would have been without your constant
pushing. Yes, we were able to do these things, but we had no intention
of doing so without you orchestrating a few targets and spinning some
crap reasons of why. Constantly giving us speeches of why we should do
these things and using our weakness of wanting to spread concerns about
security against us. You wanted us to flex our abilities in front of you
so you could log it and go crying back to the FBI in order for them to
fear us more than they feared you; you turned what we were doing into
something much more sinister so that they thought that apprehending us
was more in their interests than putting you in jail. All so you could
go back home and take selfies of yourself for the media.

If the authorities have anything to fear, it isn't our skills (although,
people should fix their shit. Seriously. For every ones sake.) it's
people like you who run their mouth and rile the impressionable up to a
point of anger, using your charismatic way of exciting people into a
false sense of revolution. Whilst all you care about is yourself and
your ulterior motives. We were interested in the way things work and our
want and our need to learn and penetrate so-called secure systems
clouded our judgement of your real intentions. I take full
responsibility for what I have done. I've served my time in jail, I was
tagged, I'm on probation, I have restrictions that hinder my general
progress towards a career but I have accepted the punishment - so if you
think that this is me trying to offshoot any blame, then don't. I know
what I've done. I actually feel most shame for some of the things I said
to people along the way and lives I effected more than anything. But you
have taken exactly ZERO responsibility for any of this.

So who are you Hector? 'Legendary hacker' ? 'leader of anonymous and
Lulzsec' ? You would have functioned better as a cult leader. Pushing,
pressuring and preying on younger and smarter people than yourself and
running them into the ground. If all you did was relay information for
the FBI and steal credit card details (which you didn't even do. You got
us to do it for you.) then what is your purpose anyway? Since most of
the words you spun us were under influence of the FBI you couldn't have
meant any of it considering you were just trying to get us to do things
to report. You don't care about movements or activism or rights, because
you try sell out anybody who does. You know a few good tricks but as a
general rule your hacking know-how is quite limited. So who are you
Hector Xavier Monsegur and why are you on TV? Because I spent quite a
while getting to know you, and all I see is a coward and a fraud.

"I would stay away from anonymous" says ANONYMOUSabu who riled up
thousands to hate authorities and even tried to incite violence towards
them.

"It was too much publicity" says the person whose main focus was to talk
shit on twitter.

"They knew my weakness was my kids" says the man who I continuously
warned to back away from all of this and never come back, for your kids
sake. I tried to protect those kids way before you even tried to use
them as a reason for saving yourself and betraying your friends. I
wouldn't blame you for choosing your children over your friends if it
saved them from going into the system, any sane person would - but I do
blame you for putting crime before your children in the first place. It
should have never come down to that decision to begin with and you know
I told you this countless times. Spinning your kids as a reason for
being a coward is idiotic and false and makes you look desperate to try
rationalise what you did.

'helped intercept attacks and share them with the government' - attacks
that YOU initially thought up, so you didn't prevent anything, you just
suggested something and when we spoke about it you relayed what
information we gathered and you put an end to it and avoided nearly 30
years in prison? Wow. You certainly are an American hero, a (what was it
you said?) "inspiration" to people. I, for one, can't wait to teach my
children to set my friends up and help the FBI entrap. A true role model
to all.

"it wasn't a situation where I identified anybody. I didn't point my
fingers at anybody." -  I'll let the FBI handle this one:
"monsegur also provided crucial and detailed information about the
formation, organisation, hierarchy and membership of these hacking
groups, as well as specific information about their planning and
execution of many major cyber attacks, including the specific roles of
his co-conspirators in committing those crimes."
"Monsegur assists law enforcement in identifying and locating lulzsec
members and affiliates. In addition to this crucial historical
information, Monsegur proactively cooperated with ongoing Government
investigations. Working sometimes literally around the clock, at the
direction of the law enforcement. Monsegur engages his co-conspirators
in online chats and were critical to confirming their identities and
whereabouts."
So the FBI were wrong? In that case surely you can go join Jeremy in
jail as because snitching on your 'brothers' is the only reason you're
at home eating doughnuts right now.

I won't babble on any more because but I will ask you, respectfully, to
stop talking so much shit and own up to something (preferably something
that you actually did and not somebody else. Claiming responsibility to
make yourself looked more skilled than you are is just strange Hector.)
You're on TV giggling like a little school girl about how you used to
hack free AOL Internet as a child as Jeremys talent rots away in jail by
your hand.

Oh, before I forget and obviously completely unrelated - what is the
legal age of sexual consent over there? 18? How old did you think I was?
16? You weren't the only one who kept logs Hector.
Be a decent human for once in your life and find that hole to crawl back
into instead of rubbing what you did in peoples faces.

Yours respectfully,
Your "brother" Ryan.

(@APT1337)
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Twitter OSINT Strategies

My current tweet dumper iteration dumps everything collected into a flat file. That’s fine for intermittent use, but won’t do much good when we eventually get into the “big leagues” and start grabbing at streams of data that will include above and beyond 3200 tweets. Flat files will quickly swell to sizes that are no longer manageable.

Wat do.

Well, there are hundreds of “database backend” options. Literally hundreds. We’re inevitably going to be storing tweets from various sources with multiple goals in mind. A veritable forest of *.csv files doesn’t neatly organize our data. SQLite3 will provide the backend. It’s local, zero configuration required, and we can concentrate all our information into a single file with multiple tables.

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Ruby Tweet Scraper v.02

I’ve made improvements to the tweet dumper. Added geo information. Also added progress bar, so check gem requirements.

#!/bin/env ruby
# encoding: utf-8

require 'twitter'
require 'csv'
require 'progressbar'

client = Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config|
	config.consumer_key = "YoursHere"
	config.consumer_secret = "YoursHere"
	config.access_token = "YoursHere"
	config.access_token_secret = "YoursHere"
end

scrname = String.new ARGV[0]

def collect_with_max_id(collection=[], max_id=nil, &block)
  response = yield(max_id)
  collection += response
  response.empty? ? collection.flatten : collect_with_max_id(collection, response.last.id - 1, &block)
end

def client.get_all_tweets(user)
  twtcount = user(user).statuses_count
  if twtcount > 3200
      twtcount = 3200 / 200
  else
      twtcount = twtcount / 200
  end
  pbar = ProgressBar.new("Downloading", twtcount)
  collect_with_max_id do |max_id|
    pbar.inc
    options = {:count => 200, :include_rts => true}
    options[:max_id] = max_id unless max_id.nil?
    user_timeline(user, options)
  end
end

junk = client.get_all_tweets(scrname)

CSV.open("#{scrname}.csv", "w") do |csv|
	junk.each do |tweet|
		csv << [tweet.id, tweet.created_at, tweet.user.screen_name, tweet.text, tweet.source, tweet.geo]
	end
end

I don’t comment. Sorry. I guess I can go back through and comment where it’s helpful and repost another time. It works with Ruby 1.9.2 anyways.

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Ruby Twitter Scraper

Requires the twitter gem. Install it as per usual. Code as follows:

#!/bin/env ruby
# encoding: utf-8

require 'twitter'
require 'csv'

client = Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config|
	config.consumer_key = "insert"
	config.consumer_secret = "insert"
	config.access_token = "insert"
	config.access_token_secret = "insert"
end

def collect_with_max_id(collection=[], max_id=nil, &block)
  response = yield(max_id)
  collection += response
  response.empty? ? collection.flatten : collect_with_max_id(collection, response.last.id - 1, &block)
end

def client.get_all_tweets(user)
  collect_with_max_id do |max_id|
    options = {:count => 200, :include_rts => true}
    options[:max_id] = max_id unless max_id.nil?
    user_timeline(user, options)
  end
end

junk = client.get_all_tweets(ARGV[0])

CSV.open("#{ARGV[0]}.csv", "w") do |csv|
	junk.each do |tweet|
		csv << [tweet.id, tweet.created_at, tweet.user.screen_name, tweet.text, tweet.source, tweet.geo]
	end
end

Excellent. I’m going to revise it as necessary, but it’s a most effective scraper. Though I’d love to add some sort of progress bar to it, haven’t succeeded in that yet. I’ll keep you posted and update it as the iterations of this thing change. It was smashed together from the twitter gem’s bare scraper and CSV output added. I’m quite pleased. Going to also consider adding time and date statistics compilation. I might just write an entirely separate script for that. Not sure yet.

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Putting It All Together

Grab the mention counter. Grab the tweet scraper. Point it at four or five “known” associated targets and grab 3k tweets at regular expected intervals. Better yet, use tweepy to regularly grab tweets as they’re sent. Amass a good amount. Once you’ve amassed a good amount of tweets, fire up the mention counter. Make your cutoff large. Make it count.

Fire up Gephi and open your CSV in it. It should automatically generate an interesting map. Use the heat map feature to get even more interesting results. Be amazed that you can OSINT. Most of all, have fun.

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Ruby Twitter Mention Counter

Ruby is like the Visual Basic of the scripting world. You can do simple shit in ten lines of code or less. After experimentation, googling, and satisfaction of curiosity I’ve sated myself with a simple counterpart to my python tweet dumper.

Two arguments. Twitter screen name and cutoff for number of mentions. It’s useful to see your data in a new way. I’m going to take it further pretty soon, processing date information to squeeze every bit of usefulness out of it.

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Tweet Scraper in Python

Code first, talk later.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
 
import tweepy #https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy
import unicodecsv
import sys
 
#Twitter API credentials
consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""
 
 
def get_all_tweets(screen_name):
	#Twitter only allows access to a users most recent 3240 tweets with this method
	
	#authorize twitter, initialize tweepy
	auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
	auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
	api = tweepy.API(auth)
	
	#initialize a list to hold all the tweepy Tweets
	alltweets = []	
	
	#make initial request for most recent tweets (200 is the maximum allowed count)
	new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200)
	
	#save most recent tweets
	alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
	
	#save the id of the oldest tweet less one
	oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1
	
	#keep grabbing tweets until there are no tweets left to grab
	while len(new_tweets) > 0:
		print "getting tweets before %s" % (oldest)
		
		#all subsiquent requests use the max_id param to prevent duplicates
		new_tweets = api.user_timeline(screen_name = screen_name,count=200,max_id=oldest)
		
		#save most recent tweets
		alltweets.extend(new_tweets)
		
		#update the id of the oldest tweet less one
		oldest = alltweets[-1].id - 1
		
		print "...%s tweets downloaded so far" % (len(alltweets))
	
	#transform the tweepy tweets into a 2D array that will populate the csv	
	outtweets = [[tweet.id_str, tweet.created_at, tweet.text.encode('utf-8'), tweet.geo, tweet.source] for tweet in alltweets]
	
	#write the csv	
	with open('%s_tweets.csv' % screen_name, 'wb') as f:
		writer = unicodecsv.writer(f)
		writer.writerow(["id","created_at","text","geo","source"])
		writer.writerows(outtweets)
	
	pass
 
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
	#pass in the username of the account you want to download
	get_all_tweets(sys.argv[1])

The entirety of this script doesn’t belong to me at all. My only contribution is fixing utf-8 issues. Requires tweepy and unicodecsv. Outputs tweets in a comma-delimited text file.

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Blueberries and Phil Shaltz

Twitter harbors some interesting people. Far more interesting people than most social networks such as Myspace and Facebook, perhaps in part because it’s not as popular as the aforementioned social networks. Individuals such as C1TYofFL1NT and TheLastBand1t are quite attentive to some fascinating goings-on in Flint. They’re more attentive to local politics than any other folks I’ve met.

Specifically, these two gentlemen are keen on blueberries. What does anything important have to do with blueberries? The answer probably won’t surprise you, because your gut instinct is quite correct when you assume nothing at all. That’s right, Phil Shaltz bought a billboard and had it say “I’m concerned about the blueberries.”

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