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Title: Hack Back
Author: Subcowmandante Marcos, Phineas Fisher
Date: 2019
Language: en
Topics: computers, technology, attack, hacking, how to
Source: Retrieved on December 30, 2019 from https://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Sherwood/HackBack_EN.txt
Notes: Spanish language original on La Biblioteca Anarquista here: https://es.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/phineas-fisher-hack-back

Subcowmandante Marcos, Phineas Fisher

Hack Back

The original can be found in spanish at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191117042838/http://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Sherwood/HackBack.txt

footnotes beginning with * have been added to explain spanish-language

cultural references in the text other footnotes have been substituted

with english language references when available poetry and lyrics have

been left untranslated, as that requires a much more skilled writer than

myself to translate well

This is my simple word, which seeks to touch the hearts of those who are

humble and simple, but also dignified and rebellious. This is my simple

word to tell about my hacks, and to invite others to hack with joyful

rebellion. [1]

I hacked a bank. I did it to give an injection of liquidity, but this

time from below [2], for the simple and humble people that resist and

rebel against injustice all over the world [3]. In other words, I robbed

a bank and gave away the money. But I didn't do it myself. The free

software movement, the offensive powershell community, the metasploit

project, and the general hacker community made the hack possible. The

community at exploit.in made it possible to turn the compromise of a

bank's computers into cash and bitcoin. And the Tor, Qubes, and Whonix

projects, along with cryptographers, and anonymity and privacy

activists, are my nahuales (protectors) [4]. They accompany me every

night and make it possible for me to remain free.

I didn't do anything complicated. I just saw the injustice in this

world, felt love for everyone, and expressed that love the best way I

knew how, through the tools I knew how to use. I'm not motivated by hate

for banks or the rich, but by a love for life, and a desire for a world

where everyone can realise their potential and live fully. I hope to

explain a little how I see the world, so you can understand how I came

to feel and act this way. And I hope this guide is a recipe you can

follow, to combine the same ingredients and bake the same cake. Who

knows, maybe these same powerful tools can help you to express your

love.

The police will spend endless resources investigating me. They think the

system works, or at least it will once they arrest all the "bad guys".

I'm just the product of a broken system. As long as there's injustice,

exploitation, alienation, violence, and ecological destruction, there'll

be an endless series of people like me, who reject as illegitimate the

system responsible for such suffering. Arresting me won't fix their

broken system. I'm just one of millions of seeds of rebellion planted by

Tupac 238 years ago in La Paz [5], and I hope that my actions and

writings water the seed of rebellion in your hearts.

To make ourselves heard [6], hackers sometimes have to adopt a mask, as

we're not interested in our identity being known, but in our word being

understood. The mask can be from Guy Fawkes, Salvador Dalí, Fsociety, or

even a puppet of a frog [7]. I felt most affinity for Marcos, so I dug

up his grave [8] to use his balaclava. I should make clear that Marcos

is entirely innocent of everything I say here due to the simple fact

that, in addition to being dead, I've never spoken to him. I hope that

his ghost, if he finds out about this from his hammock in Chiapas, will

have the generosity to simply, as they say over there, "look past me",

with the same face that one would look at the passing of an untimely

insect-an insect that might very well be a beetle. [9]

Even with the mask and change of name, many who support my actions will

put too much attention on me. With their individual agency broken by a

lifetime of domination, they look for a leader to follow or a hero to

save them. But behind the mask, I'm just a child. Todos somos niños

salvajes. Nós só temos que colocar uma estrela em chamas em nossos

corações.

1 - Why Expropriate

Capitalism is a system where a minority, through war, theft and

exploitation, have laid claim to the vast majority of the world's

resources. By taking away the commons [10], they forced the majority

under the control of the minority that own everything. It's a system

that's fundamentally incompatible with freedom, equality, democracy, and

Buen Vivir. That might sound ridiculous to those of us who grew up with

a propaganda machine teaching us that capitalism is freedom, but it's

not a new or controversial idea [11]. The founders of the US knew they

had to choose between creating a capitalist society, or a free and

democratic one. Madison recognized that "the man who is possessed of

wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of

the wants or feelings of the day laborer." But to protect against "a

leveling spirit" from the landless labourers, he felt that only

landowners should vote, and the government should be designed "to

protect the minority of the opulent against the majority". John Jay was

more to the point, saying: "the people who own the country ought to

govern it".

In the same way that bell hooks [12] argues that it's in men's

self-interest to reject the dominator culture of patriarchy, as it

emotionally cripples them and prevents them from fully feeling love and

connection, I think the dominator culture of capitalism has a similar

effect on the rich, and that they could live more whole and fulfilling

lives by rejecting the class system they think they benefit from. For

many, class privilege just means a childhood of emotional neglect,

followed by a lifetime of superficial social interaction and meaningless

work. They may know deep down that they can only genuinely connect with

people when they work with them as equals, not when people work for

them. They may know that the most fulfilling thing they could do with

their material wealth is to share it. They may know that meaningful

experiences, connections, and relationships don't come from market

interactions, but by rejecting the logic of the market and giving

without expecting anything in return. They may know that all they need

to do to break out of their prison and truly live is to let go, lose

control, and take a leap of faith. But most just aren't brave enough.

So it would be naive to focus our efforts on trying to spark a spiritual

or moral awakening in the rich [13]. As Assata Shakur says: "Nobody in

the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing

to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." In reality,

when the rich give away their money, they almost always do so in a way

that reinforces the system that allowed them to amass a huge amount of

illegitimate wealth in the first place [14]. And change is unlikely to

come through the political process, as Lucy Parsons says: "We can never

be deceived that the rich will allow us to vote their wealth away". In

[15], Colin Jenkins justifies expropriation:

He thinks the first step is, "we must free our mental bondage (believing

wealth and private property have been earned by those who monopolize it;

and, thus, should be respected, revered, and even sought after), open

our minds, study and understand history, and recognize this illegitimacy

together." Some books that helped me with that were

[16][17][18][19][20].

According to Barack Obama, economic inequality is "the defining

challenge of our time". Computer hacking is a powerful tool for

addressing economic inequality. Keith Alexander, the former director of

the NSA, agrees, saying hacking is responsible for "the greatest

transfer of wealth in history".

2 - Introduction

This guide explains how I hacked Cayman National Bank and Trust Company

(Isle of Man). Why am I publishing this almost four years later?

1) To show what is possible

Hackers working for social change have limited themselves to the

development of privacy and security tools, DDoS, defacements, and leaks.

Around the world, projects for radical social change exist in a state of

complete precarity, and could do a lot with a little expropriated money.

At least among the working class, bank robbing is socially accepted, and

the robbers often seen as folk heroes. In the digital age, bank robbing

is nonviolent, less risky, and has a higher payoff than ever. So why is

it only being done by blackhats for personal profit, and not by

hacktivists to fund radical projects? Maybe they don't imagine

themselves as capable of it. Major bank hacks have occasionally been in

the news, such as the Bangladesh Bank hack [21] attributed to North

Korea, and bank hacks attributed to the Carbanak [22] group, described

as being a very organised and large group of russian hackers with

different members specialising in different jobs. It's not that

complicated.

Through our collective belief that the financial system is

unchallengeable, we control ourselves, and maintain the class system

without those at the top really needing to do anything [23]. Seeing how

vulnerable and fragile the financial system really is helps to break

that collective delusion. So banks have a strong incentive to not report

hacks, and to overstate the sophistication of the attackers. Every

financial hack that I've done or known of has not been made public. This

will be the first, and only because I decided to publish, not the bank.

As you'll learn in this DIY guide, hacking a bank and wiring out money

through the SWIFT network does not require the backing of a government,

or a large, professional and specialised group. It is entirely possible

as an amateur, unsophisticated hacker, with public tools and basic

scripting knowledge.

2) Helping others cash out

Many people reading this will already have, or with some dedicated

study, will be able to learn the technical skills needed to do a similar

hack. However, many will not have the criminal connections necessary to

cash out properly. This was the first bank I hacked, and at the time I

only had mediocre bank drops (accounts for safely receiving and cashing

out illegal transfers), so I was only able to wire out a couple hundred

thousand in total when it's normal to make millions. I do now have the

knowledge and connections to properly cash out, so if you hack a bank

but need help turning that access into actual money, and want to use

that money to fund radical social projects, contact me.

3) Collaboration

It is possible to hack banks as an amateur hacker working alone, but

it's not usually quite as easy as I make it look here. I got lucky with

this bank for several reasons:

how everything worked.

you need to write code to hide your wires from their monitoring.

connecting to the SWIFT network. Most banks are now using RSA SecurID or

some form of 2FA. This can be bypassed by writing code to alert you when

they enter their token so you can use it before it expires. This is

simpler than it sounds. I've used Get-Keystrokes [24] modified not to

store keylogs but just to, when it detects their username has been

typed, make a GET request to my server with their username appended to

the url, and then as they type the token, make GET requests with the

digits of the token appended to the url. Meanwhile on my computer I have

running:

I feel like by collaborating with other experienced bank hackers, we

could be doing 100s of banks like Carbanak, rather than doing one every

now and then by myself. So if you have experience doing similar hacks

and would like to collaborate, contact me. My PGP key and email is at

the end of [25].

3 - Stay safe out there

It's important to take some simple precautions. I'll reference this

section from my last guide [26], since it apparently works well enough

[27]. All I'll add is that, as Trump has said, "Unless you catch hackers

in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking.", so

police are getting increasingly creative [28][29] in their attempts to

catch criminals in the act (and with their encrypted disks unlocked).

It'd be good to have your computer automatically shutdown when a

bluetooth device on your person moves out of range, or an accelerometer

detects movement or something.

It's probably not safe to write long papers detailing your ideology and

actions (oops!), but sometimes I feel I should.

4 - Getting In

In [30] I talk about the main ways to get initial access in a company's

network during a targeted attack. However, this was not a targeted

attack. I didn't set out to hack a specific bank, I just wanted to hack

any bank, which is a much easier task. This sort of untargeted approach

was popularised by Lulzsec and Anonymous [31]. For [32], I'd prepared an

exploit and post-exploitation tools for a popular VPN device.

Afterwards, I scanned the internet with zmap [33] and zgrab to identify

other vulnerable devices. I had the scanner record vulnerable IPs, along

with the common name and alternative names from the device's SSL

certificate, windows domain names from the device, and the IP's reverse

DNS lookup. I grep'd the output for "bank", and had plenty to choose

from, but the word "Cayman" really caught my eye, so that's how I picked

this one.

4.1 - The Exploit

When I published my last DIY guide [34], I didn't reveal details of the

sonicwall exploit I used to hack Hacking Team, as it was quite useful

for other hacks such as this one, and I wasn't done having fun with it

yet. Determined to hack Hacking Team, I'd spent weeks reverse

engineering their model of sonicwall ssl-vpn, and even managed to find

several somewhat difficult to exploit memory corruption vulns, before I

realised it was easily exploitable with shellshock [35]. When shellshock

came out, many sonicwall devices were vulnerable, just with a request to

cgi-bin/welcome, and a payload in the user-agent. Dell released a

security update and advisory for those versions. The version used by

Hacking Team and this bank had the vulnerable version of bash, but cgi

requests wouldn't trigger shellshock except for requests to a shell

script, and there was one accessible: cgi-bin/jarrewrite.sh. This

apparently escaped the notice of Dell as they never issued a security

update or advisory for that version of sonicwall. And helpfully, dell

had made dos2unix setuid root, making the device easy to root.

In my last guide, many read that I spent weeks researching a device and

coming up with an exploit, and assumed that meant I was some sort of

elite hacker. The reality, that it took me two weeks to realise that it

was trivially exploitable with shellshock, is perhaps less flattering

for me, but I think is more inspiring. It shows you really can do this

yourself. You don't need to be a genius, I'm certainly not. In reality

my work against Hacking Team began a year earlier. When I learned about

Hacking Team and Gamma Group from Citizen Lab's research [36][37], I

decided to poke around and see if I could find anything. I didn't get

anywhere with Hacking Team, but with Gamma Group I got lucky and was

able to hack their customer support portal with basic sql injection and

file upload vulns [38][39]. However, despite the support server giving

me a pivot into Gamma Group's internal network, I was unable to further

compromise the company. From my experience with Gamma Group and other

hacks, I realised I was really limited by my lack of knowledge of

privilege escalation and lateral movement in windows domains, and lack

of knowledge of active directory and windows in general. So I studied

and practiced (see section 11), until I felt ready to revisit Hacking

Team almost a year later. The practice paid off, and that time I was

able to fully compromise the company [40]. Before I realised that I

could get in with shellshock, I was prepared to happily spend months

studying exploit development and writing a reliable exploit for one of

the memory corruption vulns I'd found. I just knew that Hacking Team

needed to be exposed, and that I'd take as long as I needed and learn

whatever I needed to make that happen. To do these hacks you don't need

to be brilliant. You don't even need great technical knowledge. You just

need to be dedicated and to believe in yourself.

4.2 - The Backdoor

Part of the backdoor that I'd prepared for Hacking Team (see [41]

section 6) was a simple wrapper around the login page to record

passwords:

In the case of Hacking Team, they logged into the VPN with one-time

passwords, so the VPN just got me network access and I still needed to

do some work to get domain admin in their network. I wrote about lateral

movement and privilege escalation in windows domains in that guide [42].

In this case, their windows domain passwords were used for

authentication with the VPN, so I got a bunch of windows passwords,

including a domain admin. I now had full access in their network, but

that's normally the easy part. The harder part is understanding how they

operate and how to get money out.

4.3 - Fun Facts

Interestingly, from following their investigation of the hack, it seems

someone else may have independently compromised the bank around the same

time I did, with a targeted phishing email [43]. As the old saying goes,

"give someone an exploit and they'll have access for a day, teach them

to phish and they'll have access for life" [44]. Also, that someone else

randomly targeted the same small bank at the same time I did (they'd

registered a domain similar to the bank's real one to send the phish

from), suggests that bank hacks are happening way more often than is

being reported.

A fun tip so that you can follow investigations of your hacks, is to

have backup access that you don't touch unless you lose your normal

access. I have one simple script that just asks for commands once a day

or less, and is just for maintaining long term access in the event my

normal access is blocked. Then I had powershell empire [45] connecting

back more frequently to a different IP, and had empire spawn meterpreter

[46] to a third IP, which I used for most of my work. When PWC came to

investigate the hack, they found the empire and meterpreter usage and

cleaned those computers and blocked those IPs, but didn't detect my

backup access. PWC had added network monitoring devices so they could

analyze traffic and find if computers were still infected, so I didn't

want to connect to their network much. I just ran mimikatz once to get

their new passwords, and then followed along with their investigation by

reading their emails in outlook web access.

5 - Understanding a Bank's Operations

In order to understand how the bank operated and how I could get money

out, I followed the techniques I outlined in [47] in section "13.3 -

Internal reconnaissance". I downloaded a list of all filenames, grep'd

it for words like "SWIFT" and "wire", and downloaded and viewed any

files with interesting names. I also searched employee emails, but by

far the most useful technique was watching how bank employees work with

keylogging and screenshots. I didn't know about it at the time, but

windows comes with a great built in monitoring tool for this [48]. As

described in [49] in 13.3 technique #5, I keylogged the whole domain

(recording window titles along with keystrokes), grep'd for SWIFT, and

found some employees opening 'SWIFT Access Service Bureau - Logon'. For

those employees, I executed meterpreter as in [50], and used the

post/windows/gather/screen_spy module to take screenshots every 5

seconds, to watch how they work. They were using a remote citrix app

from bottomline [51] to access the SWIFT network, where each SWIFT MT103

payment message had to pass through three employees, one to "create" the

message, one to "verify" it, and one to "authorise" it. Since I had all

their credentials thanks to the keylogger, I could easily do those three

steps myself. And as far as I could tell from watching them work, they

did not review sent SWIFT messages, so I should have enough time to get

money out of my bank drops before the bank notices and tries to reverse

the wires.

6 - Sending the money

I had no clue what I was doing and was just figuring it out as I went

along. Somehow the first wires I sent out went fine. The next day, I

messed up sending a wire to mexico which put an end to my fun. This bank

was sending their international wires thanks to their correspondent

account at Natwest. I'd seen that wires in GBP had their correspondent

listed as NWBKGB2LGPL, while all others were NWBKGB2LXXX. The mexican

wire was in GBP so I assumed I should put NWBKGB2LGPL as the

correspondent. However, if I'd done more preparation I'd have known that

the GPL instead of XXX meant to send the payment via the UK-only Faster

Payments Service, rather than as an international wire, which obviously

isn't going to work when trying to send money to mexico. So the bank got

an error message back. The same day, I also tried to send a £200k

payment to the UK using NWBKGB2LGPL, which failed because 200k was over

their limit for sending via faster payments so I needed to use

NWBKGB2LXXX. They got an error message for that too. They read the

messages, investigated, and saw the rest of my wires.

7 - The loot

From my writing, you probably have a good sense of what my ideas are and

what I support. However, I don't want anyone to have legal problems over

receiving expropriated funds, so I won't say anything more about where

the money went. Journalists will also probably want to put a dollar

figure on how much I redistributed through this and similar hacks, but

I'd rather not encourage our perverse habit of measuring actions by

their economic value. Any action, done from a place of love rather than

ego, is admirable. Unfortunately, those our society most respects and

values: public figures, businessmen, people in "important" positions,

and the rich and powerful, generally got where they are by acting more

out of ego that out of love. It's the simple, humble, and "invisible"

people that we should look for and admire.

8 - Cryptocurrency

Redistributing expropriated money to awesome projects making positive

social change would be easier and safer if those projects accepted

anonymous donations via cryptocurrency like monero, zcash, or at least

bitcoin. Understandably, a lot of those projects have an aversion to

cryptocurrency, as it looks more like some weird hypercapitalist

dystopia than the social economy we envision. I share their skepticism,

but think that it is useful for enabling anonymous donations and

transactions, and limiting government surveillance and control. Much

like cash, which for the same reasons many countries are trying to limit

the use of.

9 - Powershell

In this, and in [52], I made heavy use of powershell. At the time,

powershell was great, you could do pretty much anything you wanted, with

no AV detection and little forensic footprint. However with the

introduction of AMSI [53], offensive powershell is on the way out.

Nowadays offensive C# is in, with tools like [54][55][56][57]. AMSI is

coming to .NET in 4.8 so C# tools will probably have a nice couple years

before they also go out of style. Then we'll go back to using C or C++,

or maybe Delphi will come back in style. Specific tools and techniques

change every couple of years but there's really not that much change.

Hacking today is fundamentally the same as it was in the 90s. Even all

the powershell scripts used here and in [58] are still perfectly usable

today, after a little custom obfuscation.

10 - Torrent

Offshore banking provides businessmen, politicians, and the rich with

privacy from their own government. It might seem hypocritical for me to

expose them, seeing as I'm generally in favor of privacy and against

government surveillance. However, the law was already written by and for

the rich to protect their system of exploitation, with some limits (ie

taxation), so that society can function and their system doesn't

collapse under their own greed. So privacy for the powerful, allowing

them to evade the limits of a system already designed to privilege them,

is not the same thing as privacy for the weak, which protects them from

a system designed to exploit them.

Even journalists with the best intentions can't possibly look through

such a massive amount of material and know what is relevant to different

people around the world. When I leaked Hacking Team's files, I'd given

the Intercept everything but the RCS source code a month ahead of time.

They found a couple of the 0days Hacking Team was using and reported

them to MS and Adobe ahead of time, and published a few stories after

the leak was public. Compare that with the massive amount of stories and

research that came out of the full public leak. Looking at that, and the

managed (non)release [59] of the panama papers, I think fully and

publicly leaking the material is the correct choice.

Psychologists have found that those at the bottom of hierarchies tend to

empathise with and understand those at the top, but that the reverse is

less common. This explains why in this sexist world, many men joke about

how they can't understand women, as if they're an inexplicable mystery.

It explains why the rich, if they stop and think about those in poverty

at all, give advice and "solutions" so out of touch with reality that

it's laughable. It explains why we hail businessmen as brave risk

takers. What are they risking, besides their privilege? If all their

ventures fail, they'll just have to live and work like the rest of us.

It also explains why many will call this unredacted leak irresponsible

and dangerous. They feel more strongly the "danger" to an offshore bank

and it's clients, than they feel the misery of those dispossessed by

this unequal and unjust system. Is leaking their finances truly even a

danger to them, or just to their position at the top of a hierarchy that

shouldn't exist?

11 - Learn to hack

The best way to learn hacking is through practice. Set up a lab

environment with virtual machines and start trying things out, taking

breaks to research anything you don't understand. At a minimum you'll

want a windows server as a domain controller, another normal domain

joined windows vm, and a dev machine with visual studio for compiling

and modifying tools. Try out meterpreter, mimikatz, bloodhound,

kerberoasting, smb relaying, making an office document with macros that

spawn meterpreter or another RAT, psexec and other lateral movement

techniques [60], and the other scripts, tools and techniques mentioned

in this guide and in [61]. At first you can disable windows defender,

but then try everything with it enabled [62][63] (but with automatic

sample submission off). Once you're comfortable with all that, you're

ready to hack 99% of companies. Some things that will help you a lot to

learn at some point are being comfortable with bash and cmd.exe, basic

proficiency in powershell, python, and javascript, knowledge of kerberos

[64][65] and active directory [66][67][68][69], and fluency in english.

A good introductory book is The Hacker Playbook.

I'll also write a little about what not to focus on so you don't get

sidetracked because someone told you you're not a "real" hacker if you

don't know assembly language. Obviously, learn about whatever interests

you, but I'm writing this from the perspective of what to focus on

that'll give you the most practical results when hacking companies to

leak and expropriate. Basic knowledge of web application security [70]

is useful, but specialising more in web security is not really the best

use of time unless you want to make a career in pentesting or bug bounty

hunting. CTFs, and most of the resources you'll find when searching for

information about hacking, generally focus on skills like web security,

reverse engineering, exploit development etc. This makes sense if it's

understood as a way to prepare people for careers in industry, but not

for our goals. Intel agencies can afford to have a team dedicated to

state of the art fuzzing, a team working on exploit development with one

guy just researching new heap manipulation techniques, etc. We don't

have the time or resources for that. The two most important skills by

far for practical hacking, are phishing [71] and social engineering for

initial access, and then being able to escalate and move around in

windows domains.

12 - Recommended Reading

Today hacking is done almost entirely by blackhats for personal profit,

whitehats for shareholder profit (and in defense of the banks,

companies, and states that are destroying us and our planet), and by

militaries and intelligence agencies as part of war and conflict. Seeing

as our world is already on the brink, I thought that in addition to

technical advice on learning to hack, I should include some resources

that helped my development and have guided how I use my hacking

knowledge.

13 - Healing

Hackers have high rates of depression, suicide, and mental health

struggles. I don't think that this is caused by hacking, but by the kind

of environment many hackers come from. Like many hackers, I grew up with

little human contact, a kid raised by the internet. I struggle with

depression and emotional numbness. Willie Sutton is often quoted as

saying he robbed banks because "that's where the money is", but that's

incorrect. What he actually said was:

Hacking made me feel alive - it started as a way to self-medicate

depression. Later I realized I could actually do something positive with

it. I don't at all regret how I grew up, it's led to many beautiful

experiences in my life. But I knew I couldn't continue living that way.

So I started spending more time off my computer, with others, learning

to open myself up, to feel my emotions, to connect with others, to take

risks and to be vulnerable. It's far harder than hacking, but in the end

it's more rewarding. It's still a struggle, but even if I'm slow and

stumbling, I feel like I'm on a good path.

Hacking, done conscientiously, can also be what heals us. According to

Mayan teachings, we have a gift given to us by nature, that we need to

understand so that we can use it to serve our community. In [72], it

explains:

If you feel that hacking is increasing your isolation, depression, or

other suffering, take a break. Give yourself time to know yourself and

become aware. You deserve to live happy, healthy, and fully.

14 - Hacktivist Bug Bounty Program

I think that hacking to acquire and leak documents in the public

interest is one of the most socially beneficial ways that hackers can

use their skills. Unfortunately for hackers, as for most fields, the

perverse incentives of our economic system don't align with what

benefits society. So this program is my attempt to make it possible for

good hackers to earn an honest living uncovering material in the public

interest, rather than having to sell their labour to the cybersecurity,

cybercrime, or cyberwar industries. Examples of companies I'd love to

pay for leaks from include the mining, lumber, and cattle companies

ravaging our beautiful latin america (and assassinating the

environmentalists trying to stop them), companies involved in attacking

Rojava such as Havelsan, Baykar Makina, or Aselsan, surveillance

companies like NSO group, war criminals and profiteers like Blackwater

and Halliburton, private prison companies like GeoGroup and

CoreCivic/CCA, and corporate lobbyists like ALEC. Be mindful when

selecting where to investigate. For example, we all know that oil

companies are evil -- they're destroying the planet to get rich. They've

known that themselves since the 80s[73]. However, if you hack them

directly, you'll have to dig through enormous amounts of incredibly

boring information about their day to day operations. It'll probably be

a lot easier to find something interesting by targeting their lobbyists

[74]. Another way to select viable targets is to read stories by

investigative journalists like [75], that are interesting but lack hard

evidence. That's what your hacking can uncover.

I'll pay up to $100K each for those sorts of leaks, depending on the

public interest and impact of the material, and the work involved in the

hack. Obviously, leaking all the documents and internal communication

from some of those businesses would have a benefit to society far

exceeding 100k, but I'm not trying to make anyone rich, I'm just trying

to provide enough funding so that hackers can earn a dignified living

doing good work. Due to time constraints and security concerns, I will

not open and look through material myself. Rather, once the material is

published, I'll read what journalists write about it and judge the

public interest of the material from that. My contact information is at

the end of [76].

How you obtain the material is up to you. You can use traditional

hacking techniques outlined in this guide and in [77]. You can sim swap

[78] a corrupt politician or businessman and then download their emails

and cloud backups. You can order an IMSI catcher from alibaba and use it

outside their offices. You can go wardriving -- of the old or new kind

[79]. You can be an insider who already has access. You can go

old-school low-tech like [80] and [81] and just sneak into their

offices. Whatever works for you.

14.1 - Partial payouts

Are you a good maid working in an evil corp [82], and willing to slip a

hardware keylogger onto an executive's computer, swap out their charging

cable for a modified [83] one, hide a mic in a room where they discuss

their evil plans, or leave one of these [84] somewhere around the

office?

Are you good with phishing and social engineering and got a shell on an

employee's computer, or phished their vpn credentials? But unable to get

domain admin and download the goods?

Have you been doing bug bounty programs and become an expert in web app

hacking, but don't have enough all around hacking experience to fully

compromise the company?

Do you have a knack for reverse engineering? Scan some evil corps to see

what devices they have exposed to the internet (firewall, vpn, and mail

scanning appliances will be much more useful than stuff like IP

cameras), reverse engineer it and find a remotely exploitable

vulnerability.

If I'm able to work with you to compromise the company and get material

in the public interest, you'll be compensated for your work. If I don't

have time to work on it myself, I'll at least try and advise you on how

to continue to complete the hack yourself.

Right now helping those in power hack and surveil dissidents, activists,

and the general population is a multibillion dollar industry, while

hacking and exposing those in power is risky and unpaid volunteer work.

Turning it into a multimillion dollar industry won't quite fix that

power imbalance and solve society's problems. But I think it'll be fun.

So I can't wait for people to start claiming bounties!

15 - Abolish Prisons

It'd be typical to end a hacker zine saying free hammond, free manning,

free hamza, free those arrested in the fabricated Network case, etc.

I'll take that tradition to it's radical conclusion [85] and say abolish

prisons already! Being a criminal myself, you might feel that I'm a

little biased on the issue. But seriously, it's not even controversial,

even the UN mostly agrees [86]. So free all the migrants

[87][88][89][90], often imprisoned by the same countries who created the

war, environmental, and economic destruction that they're fleeing from.

Free everyone imprisoned by the war on drug users [91]. Free everyone

imprisoned by the war on the poor [92]. Prisons are about hiding and

ignoring the evidence of social problems rather than genuinely fixing

them. And until everyone is free, fight the prison system by not

ignoring and forgetting those stuck inside. Send them love, letters,

helicopters [93], pirate radio [94], and books, and support those

organizing from the inside [95][96].

16 - Conclusion

Our world is upside down [97]. The justice system represents injustice.

Law and order is about creating an illusion of social peace to hide deep

and systematic exploitation, violence, and injustice. Follow your

conscience, not the law.

Businessmen get rich harming people and the planet, while care work is

largely unpaid. Through the assault on anything communal, we've somehow

managed to build densely populated cities full of loneliness and

isolation. Our political and economic system encourages all the worst

possibilities of human nature: greed, selfishness, ego, competition,

lack of compassion, and love for authority. So for everyone who's stayed

sensitive and compassionate in a cold world, for all the everyday heroes

practicing everyday kindness, for all of you who have a burning star in

your hearts: гоpи, гоpи ясно, чтобы не погасло!

[1] text adapted from the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2005/06/30/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona/

[2] a reference to a speech in the series La casa de papel

[3] text adapted from the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2005/06/30/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona/

[4] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadejo#Origen_y_significado_del_mito

[5] before being murdered by the Spanish he said "they'll kill me, but

I'll return as millions".

[6] referencing another famous quote by Marcos, "Our fight has been to

make ourselves heard"

[7] referring to the masks adopted by Anonymous, La casa de papel, Mr.

Robot, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpyCl1Qm6Xs

[8] Marcos symbolically died:

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2014/05/27/between-light-and-shadow/

[9] This explanation on using Marcos' words is from Marcos/Galeano's

explanation of using the words of Javier Marías in:

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2019/08/14/the-overture-reality-as-enemy

which in turn references Durito, a beetle who makes frequent appearances

in Marcos' writing.

[10] http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

[11] https://chomsky.info/commongood02/

[12] The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

[13] their own religion is already very clear on the subject:

https://www.openbible.info/topics/rich_people

[14] The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford,

and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy

[15] http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/expropriation-or-bust.html

[16] Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization Volume 1 — Civilization:

The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings

[17] Caliban and the Witch

[18] Debt: The First 5,000 Years

[19] A People's History of the United States

[20] Open Veins of Latin America

[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbanak

[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

[24] https://github.com/PowerShellMafia/PowerSploit/blob/master/Exfiltration/Get-Keystrokes.ps1

[25] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[26] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[27] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3k9zzk/hacking-team-hacker-phineas-fisher-has-gotten-away-with-it

[28] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/

[29] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59wwxx/fbi-airs-alexandre-cazes-alphabay-arrest-video

[30] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[31] https://web.archive.org/web/20190329001614/http://infosuck.org/0x0098.png

[32] text adapted from the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2005/06/30/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona/

[33] https://github.com/zmap/zmap

[34] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[35] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)

[36] https://citizenlab.ca/tag/hacking-team/

[37] https://citizenlab.ca/tag/finfisher/

[38] https://theintercept.com/2014/08/07/leaked-files-german-spy-company-helped-bahrain-track-arab-spring-protesters/

[39] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41913

[40] https://web.archive.org/web/20150706095436/

https://twitter.com/hackingteam

[41] text adapted from the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration

http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2005/06/30/sixth-declaration-of-the-selva-lacandona/

[42] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[43] page 47, Project Pallid Nutmeg.pdf, in torrent

[44] https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/563964286783877121

[45] https://github.com/EmpireProject/Empire

[46] https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework

[47] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[48] https://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/using-problem-steps-recorder-psr-remotely-with-metasploit/

[49] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[50] https://www.trustedsec.com/2015/06/no_psexec_needed/

[51] https://www.bottomline.com/uk/products/bottomline-swift-access-services

[52] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[53] https://medium.com/@byte_St0rm/adventures-in-the-wonderful-world-of-amsi-25d235eb749c

[54] https://cobbr.io/SharpSploit.html

[55] https://github.com/tevora-threat/SharpView

[56] https://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/ghostpack/

[57] https://rastamouse.me/2019/08/covenant-donut-tikitorch/

[58] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[59] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/

[60] https://hausec.com/2019/08/12/offensive-lateral-movement/

[61] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[62] https://blog.sevagas.com/IMG/pdf/BypassAVDynamics.pdf

[63] https://www.trustedsec.com/blog/discovering-the-anti-virus-signature-and-bypassing-it/

[64] https://www.tarlogic.com/en/blog/how-kerberos-works/

[65] https://www.tarlogic.com/en/blog/how-to-attack-kerberos/

[66] https://hausec.com/2019/03/05/penetration-testing-active-directory-part-i/

[67] https://hausec.com/2019/03/12/penetration-testing-active-directory-part-ii/

[68] https://adsecurity.org/

[69] https://github.com/infosecn1nja/AD-Attack-Defense

[70] https://github.com/jhaddix/tbhm

[71] https://blog.sublimesecurity.com/red-team-techniques-gaining-access-on-an-external-engagement-through-spear-phishing/

[72] Ruxe’el mayab’ K’aslemäl: Raíz y espíritu del conocimiento maya

https://www.url.edu.gt/publicacionesurl/FileCS.ashx?Id=41748

[73] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings

[74] https://theintercept.com/2019/08/19/oil-lobby-pipeline-protests/

[75] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

[76] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[77] https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/41915

[78] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqax3/hackers-sim-swapping-steal-phone-numbers-instagram-bitcoin

[79] https://blog.rapid7.com/2019/09/05/this-one-time-on-a-pen-test-your-mouse-is-my-keyboard/

[80] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI

AND https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnecessary_Fuss

[81] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI

AND https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnecessary_Fuss

[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack

[83] http://mg.lol/blog/defcon-2019/

[84] https://shop.hak5.org/products/lan-turtle

[85] https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Are_Prisons_Obsolete_Angela_Davis.pdf

[86] http://www.unodc.org/pdf/criminal_justice/Handbook_of_Basic_Principles_and_Promising_Practices_on_Alternatives_to_Imprisonment.pdf

[87] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/21/us-immigration-detention-center-christmas-santa-wish-list

[88] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/18/us-border-patrol-facility-images-tucson-arizona

[89] https://www.playgroundmag.net/now/detras-Centros-Internamiento-Extranjeros-Espana_22648665.html

[90] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/world/australia/australia-manus-suicide.html

[91] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Quotes

[92] VI, 2. i. La multa impaga:

https://scielo.conicyt.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-00122012000100005

[93]

p. 10, Libelo Nº2. Boletín político desde la Cárcel de Alta Seguridad

[94] https://itsgoingdown.org/transmissions-hostile-territory/

[95] https://freealabamamovement.wordpress.com/f-a-m-pamphlet-who-we-are/

[96] https://incarceratedworkers.org/

[97] Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World - Galeano