Aaron Barr, a cyber security analyst for federal contractor Sayers and Associates, was recently fired from his latest job for “spending too much time” on his pursuit of Anonymous.
The Huffington Post reported Friday that Barr’s former employer fired Barr for “acting like a “cowboy” on the company dime.” Barr has been involved in numerous programs throughout his career in the security industry, several of which involved his pursuit of hacktivist collective Anonymous.
Barr was the former CEO of security firm HBGary Federal who claimed to have infiltrated the ranks of Anonymous in early 2011 and planned to reveal the “leaders” of the group, despite the fact that Anonymous claims to have no leaders. Anonymous retaliated with the release of thousands of internal emails that linked HBGary Federal to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Barrett Brown — founder of Project PM, a crowdsourced investigation focused on research and analysis of the intelligence contracting industry — alerted The Daily Caller to Barr’s firing late Friday afternoon. Brown is often associated as the public “face” of Anonymous, although he specifically does not speak for the group due to the structure and nature of Anonymous.
Brown told TheDC, “He was fired from his latest job for spending too much time going after Anonymous and presumably me. We suspected he was still up to something — when I met him in NYC, he was with the CEO of Provide Security, which vandalized our wiki when we put up a page on them.”
A wiki is a website which enables users to easily edit content via a web browser. An online associate of Thomas Ryan, a managing partner at Provide Security, by the name of ShadowDXS, was behind the wiki vandilization, Brown told TheDC:
“Thomas Ryan’s online associate did the vandalizing. The fellow, ShadowDXS, was a former Project PM participant who turned on us after Lulzsec fucked with him (no one really liked him).”
Lulzsec was a splinter group of Anonymous that hacked for the “lulz,” or laughs, not financial gain. Lulzsec is a part of a broader “anti-sec” movement, which is opposed to the computer security industry.
“His problem, like that of a lot of people who are after me, is that they can’t accept a loss, emotionally,” said Brown. “They have to feel triumph.”