Jeremy Hammond aka “Anarchaos” pled guilty in a federal case today to the December 2011 hacking of Strategic Forecasting, Inc, known to most as Stratfor.  The private intelligence firm was compromised under Anonymous operations that just preceded the early LulzSec days.  In the massive hack, 60,000 credit card numbers were stolen, and $700,000 in fraudulent charges were run up on some of those.  One million dollars was donated to various charities using the credit information.  Five million email messages were also stolen, 200 gigabytes of data, and much of the information was quite sensitive. In that Stratfor is a global intelligence group that gathered intelligence regarding a number of topics, including terrorism, government, foreign nations, industries and other parties.  The information was released on Wikileaks in February of 2012.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated:

“While he billed himself as fighting for an anarchist cause, in reality, Jeremy Hammond caused personal and financial chaos for individuals whose identities and money he took and for companies whose businesses he decided he didn’t like. He was nothing more than a repeat offender cybercriminal who thought that because of his computer savvy he was above the law that binds and protects all of us – the same law that assured his rights in a court of law and allowed him to decide whether to admit his guilt or assert his innocence.”

“Today I pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This was a very difficult decision. I hope this statement will explain my reasoning. I believe in the power of the truth. In keeping with that, I do not want to hide what I did or to shy away from my actions. This non-cooperating plea agreement frees me to tell the world what I did and why, without exposing any tactics or information to the government and without jeopardizing the lives and well-being of other activists on and offline.” – Jeremy Hammond

Hammond is a well-known hacktivist and one of the most notorious.  It is well-documented that in 2004 at the DefCon convention he advocated what later became the roots of hacktivism, preaching electronic civil disobedience.  In the wake of the Stratfor attack there was much public taunting of the lack of security, stating that Stratfor was “clueless” when it came to database security and that the passwords were stored in plain text.  Ever defiant, and facing extended sentencing for his prior crimes, he stated:

“Now that I have pleaded guilty it is a relief to be able to say that I did work with Anonymous to hack Stratfor, among other websites.  Those others included military and police equipment suppliers, private intelligence and information security firms, and law enforcement agencies.”

Hammond has been detained without bail in a New York City federal detention center since March of 2012.  His guilty plea basically brings all his admissions to the present case, and in doing so if he lost at trial, he avoids additional sentencing attached to any new indictments.  He now faces up to ten years under the plea agreement and tacked on to that is a potential restitution that can scale up to $2.5 million.  Hammond will be sentenced by Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska on September 6, 2013.

Hammond and others were betrayed by another well-known hacker known as “Sabu”, Hector Xavier Monsegur.  During these events Monsegur colluded with the FBI as an informant, luring hackers into leaking information onto servers that were under FBI control.  Hammond was the lead coordinator of the Stratfor attacks, and the attack on the Arizona DPS earlier that year.