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What's terrifying about this is that this company somehow scored a contract with the FBI. How many other HBGary Federals are there out there?

• tptacek 16y ago
  Why is wanting to compete with nmap a terrifying attribute of an FBI contractor? Technology within the FBI pretty much begins and ends with EnCase.
  • kovar 16y ago
    While the FBI isn't known for being on the technical bleeding edge, and used to bleed a lot for technical screwups, the RCFL's - Regional Computer Forensics Labs - are very much out there on the leading edge of computer forensics technology. --- There are some amazing technical innovations in EnCase and the products built on it. Unfortunately, the company has management issues that result in some very poor decisions in many areas, including deployment of software development resources.
    • m0nastic 16y ago
      I've been using EnCase for about a decade (including a large portion of that working with the FBI), and I honestly can't think of any amazing technical innovations. The support for reading .pst files? The fact that it can finally handle filesystems besides FAT32 and NTFS? Certainly not it's stability. EnCase is very good at what it was designed for, which is basically an idiot-proof way for an investigator to comb through a hard drive looking for search terms. I would argue that technically EnCase isn't even as good as FTK, which is something that pretty much every third-party evaluation of the two products has shown. I won't disagree that there are some smart folks working at the FBI, and that's not even counting the ones who spend all their time developing "zoom and enhance" software for photo analysis.
• arctangent 16y ago
  One who immediately springs to mind is Dennis Montgomery. Here is a link that is NSFW: http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon-dennis-montgomery/ http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-penta... In all of these cases one of the main problems seems to be that non-technical people have too much decision making power in technical areas. (I'm not going to address this huge problem here.) I've lost count of the number of times I've been in a meeting listening to someone talk about something like the "Linear Feedback Shift Register" mentioned in the article. Unfortunately, technology seems like magic (or snake oil) to people who don't know anything about it...
• kovar 16y ago
  Greg and Aaron, two of the guys involved with HBGary, are incredibly smart and capable. They were very well respected in the industry for their intelligence, products, and services. --- How well would you stand up in the court of public opinion if several years of the internal email messages for your startup were leaked? I'm very concerned about the rise of the cybersecurity/infosec complex ala the military-industrial complex, but one of the reasons for my concern is that they have very bright, very motivated people working for them who know how to play the D.C. political games.
  • pnathan 16y ago
    Well, that email is a piece of relatively ignorant crap that I could have written when I was 17. The last time I read something like that was a Phrack interview....
• cookiecaper 16y ago
  The longer you're involved the more you'll find that people in positions of authority and prominence rarely deserve them.