7 ms·

FBI arrests man for plan to kill 70% of Internet in AWS bomb attack

116 points by el_duderino 6y ago

therockspush 6y ago
First thought when I see the headline is another case of the FBI "catching" a bomber that they gave the bomb to. Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad.
- darig 6y ago
  We need an FBFBII to add some checks and balances to the system.
- olliej 6y ago
  Not quite - this time it seems like the person was already stating they were planning to blow up the data centers. Slightly different from the other FBI idiocies which are closer to "this person said they hate amazon, lets radicalize them until they want a bomb"
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    Maybe I'm misreading the criminal complaint but it seems like he says something like "If I had cancer I'd drive a truck into their data center and blow it up" and the FBI informants encouraged him and offered the bombs.
- gtirloni 6y ago
  How was that grooming? He already had all the plans and was after the explosives. Someone just contacted the FBI and got him arrested. Do you see any evidence the FBI told him he should bomb those buildings and then arrested him for it?
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I think it's pretty likely the FBI convinced him to attempt to carry out this attack, to the extent that he did. For one, that's pretty much the standard FBI tactic - convince the mentally unwell to agree to something criminal and then arrest them for it. For another, the criminal complaint linked in the article kind of suggests this. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-bleepingcomputer-complaint https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-ble... Read points 18-21 especially though the whole thing is interesting. The guy starts by saying if he had cancer he'd drive a truck into these data centers and hope it would blow up 70% of the internet. The FBI guys then follow up with him "So are you going to do it yet", "Have you picked a target yet", and "I have some bombs you can use" (not exact quotes but approximate). When he drives out to take a look at the site they arrest him. Maybe this guy would've gone on to commit the same crime on his own. Maybe he would've connected with real terrorists who would've motivated him the same way the FBI did. I doubt it though - this is the FBI's retelling and we can kind of see hints of manipulation. Plus, the FBI arrests way more of these bombers than "get through". Is that because the FBI are hypervigilant and super effective, or because they are growing their own terrorists and arresting them?
    - llamataboot 6y ago
      Pretty standard - sometimes even provide the technical know-how and the materials along with the urging
    - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
      I strongly doubt he could have pulled off the Amazon incident he was envisioning. However, before the FBI inserted itself into his life, our twitwit gave strong, consistent messaging that harm needed to be done and that it was his patriotic duty to facilitate it. It appears that drumpounding rhetoric, about his America being in imminent danger, heavily shaped his thinking. Those messages were translating into drives to escalate his behavior in a harmful way. Given no changes, some sort of violent action seems an unsurprising outcome.
      - deleted 6y ago
- sitkack 6y ago
  If we know someone is going to commit a crime like this, shouldn't we just go talk to them and say, "hey, I know you are frustrated, I have scheduled some time with someone to talk about it" A thousand years from now I sure hope we aren't setting up dumb traps for the people that need help.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    I'm reposting a quote from our guy "But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully." There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?
    - shard972 6y ago
      nah they are probs racist
    - h0l0cube 6y ago
      > There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go? All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.
      - goodlinks 6y ago
        Agree so much! having billions of individual intelligences running around with the ability to kill each other is actually hard to manage. Change management is what makes organisations work, great processes or systems are just a bonus.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  My take is - for once - the FBI didn't handcraft a terror threat out of a twit who'd otherwise do nothing of note. Our twit seems to have been earnestly trying to puzzle out how to do harm - and been clear about why (he believes) harm needs to be done. Using the screen name Dionysus, he posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups, about his plan to “conduct a little experiment” in 2021. “I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” Pendley wrote. “But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.” Our twit also claims to have been part of the Jan 6 insurrection. On January 11, 2021, he told an associate on Facebook that he went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, made it to the platform where he interacted with police officers but did not enter the building. He told another associate on Facebook that he had taken a piece of glass from a window at the building.* ref: https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biography-13-things-about-wichita-falls-texas-man/ https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biograp...
  - jl2718 6y ago
    This in a world where it was fashionable for celebrities to perform mock assassinations of the President. You’re suggesting a world where a person’s thoughts can be used as evidence of their criminality. Perhaps there was more to this case, but this is what you write as convincing to you. Thoughts and words. And the same people that would imprison a wrong-thinker of the opposing political tribe, are protesting against police mistreatment of chronic violent criminals. Somehow I’m unconvinced of your sincerity. But I understand it. Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts spread faster than any disease, and the infected can’t ever be cured. They start movements and religions and wars. When asked who was the most evil person ever, it’s never a mindless antisocial killer, it’s always a person who beguiled a nation to fall in love with their thoughts. But I think this is a symptom of leisure. Perhaps you’ve never realized how little regard some people have for your life. There would be no speech, no argument, no justification, no anger, no reason, no ideology, no remorse, maybe just a little bit of amusement at how easy it was. And this is thousands of times more likely that any harm to come of some idiot lone wolf extremist of any ideology.
- BoiledCabbage 6y ago
  > Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad. It's still incredible how in this country, even more so after what's happened recently (not to mention all of the events stretching back through the 1990s) that domestic terroristic threats are lightly and jokingly brushed off by so many in society, while any other form of terrorism is asked to be dealt with with the full brunt of the law. It's incredible to watch. Someone with a specific plot to blow up a complex of buildings, goes and purchases materials to do it, and it's laughed off with a crayon joke... The double standards of this country.
d-d 6y ago
A more direct approach to serverless technology.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dahdum 6y ago
We’ll see in trial, but based on this article it doesn’t look like the FBI groomed this guy to commit a crime, but someone handed him off to an undercover agent after he was intent on doing it. That’s nice to see.
more_corn 6y ago
Destroying one AZ in one region would not (should not?) take down a single AWS customer. ALB are multi AZ, it's trivial to deploy services across azs. Everyone should be ok. Although I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test where they actually bring one down so who knows if regional services would come out unscathed. How pissed off do you think he's going to be when he learns that not only was the bomb fake, even if he had a bomb it would have amounted to little more than a disaster recovery test?
- QuinnyPig 6y ago
  In larger regions, single AZs span multiple buildings. He'd have had to basically raze 100 square miles of northern Virginia...
  - rafale 6y ago
    It would make more sense to target internet "backbone" routers, no?
- kevinventullo 6y ago
  I would not be at all surprised if AWS periodically tests bringing down a whole AZ. Facebook has been doing this for years.
- cheeze 6y ago
  > I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test I wouldn't be so sure about that.
  - sombremesa 6y ago
    Some disaster tests end up being initiated by a typo in a command.
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  And I don't think the three letter agencies are on AWS anyway...
glitchcrab 6y ago
It's _always_ us-east-1
hanklazard 6y ago
What percentage of users on MyMilitia are actually FBI? Or do they just own the backend? Hard to imagine this website isn’t a honeypot ...
- udhdhxnxn 6y ago
  50% FBI 50% ATF
- 0xy 6y ago
  Pretty much all militia groups have been infiltrated by the FBI or other agencies. The KKK is pretty well known to be stacked with fed agent provocateurs like Gary Thomas Rowe. He pushed other members into violence and attacks on other groups and individuals, while being paid by the FBI.
- barbacoa 6y ago
  It has been rumored that the leader of the proud boys is an fbi informant. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-fbi-informant https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-l... After 9/11 the fbi sent all kinds of informants into mosques to honeypot people into fake terrorist plots, it would now seem to serve the current political winds to do it to people on the right.
  - zikzak 6y ago
    This info is solely based on podcasts focused on legally matters but I think it is very common for the FBI to stop by someone's home and have a talk with them about how thier online rhetoric and personal associations have put them on a list of people that they are keeping thier eye on. For many people, this is enough to convince them it's time to cool thier jets (again, this is my impression as a layman). I think this happens far more often than "he has a barn full of fertilizer and diesel and now he's calling rental places to reserve a big panel truck so let's shut it down"...
    - CodeWriter23 6y ago
      I think if the FBI thinks someone is a threat, the last thing they do is let the suspect know they are on to him.
geoduck14 6y ago
That's not how this works! That's not how ANY OF THIS WORKS!
- HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
  Right? One guy bombing a datacenter isn't going to take down 70% of the internet. The headline is a baldfaced lie.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/
jti107 6y ago
I've gotten a tour of data center and it's not like walking into an office building. Lot of armed guards, every building required key card and pin code.
sitkack 6y ago
This guy needs to know about BGP.
carnagecity786 6y ago
>FBI agents found in late January from another source Pendley contacted using the Signal encrypted messaging app that he was planning to use C-4 plastic explosives to attack Amazon's data centers in an attempt to kill "70% of the internet." How did they discover this? I thought signal was e2e encrypted?
- bmiller2 6y ago
  Own/compel one of the ends.
- thrower123 6y ago
  It's easy when you're one of the ends
- poundofshrimp 6y ago
  It is. The source must have reported the convo.
- rasz 6y ago
  FBI was on the other end of that e2e link trying to sell him the explosives, targets and motives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Bronx_terrorism_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Bronx_terrorism_plot
- xxpor 6y ago
  The vast majority of criminals' threat models are way out of whack. They think they need to use signal so the NSA can't vacuum up their data, while completely ignoring the threat that the other side of the convo is a fed already.
motorocool 6y ago
Mr robot boy

116 points by el_duderino 6y ago

First thought when I see the headline is another case of the FBI "catching" a bomber that they gave the bomb to. Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad.

darig 6y ago
We need an FBFBII to add some checks and balances to the system.
olliej 6y ago
Not quite - this time it seems like the person was already stating they were planning to blow up the data centers. Slightly different from the other FBI idiocies which are closer to "this person said they hate amazon, lets radicalize them until they want a bomb"
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Maybe I'm misreading the criminal complaint but it seems like he says something like "If I had cancer I'd drive a truck into their data center and blow it up" and the FBI informants encouraged him and offered the bombs.
gtirloni 6y ago
How was that grooming? He already had all the plans and was after the explosives. Someone just contacted the FBI and got him arrested. Do you see any evidence the FBI told him he should bomb those buildings and then arrested him for it?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I think it's pretty likely the FBI convinced him to attempt to carry out this attack, to the extent that he did. For one, that's pretty much the standard FBI tactic - convince the mentally unwell to agree to something criminal and then arrest them for it. For another, the criminal complaint linked in the article kind of suggests this. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-bleepingcomputer-complaint https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-ble... Read points 18-21 especially though the whole thing is interesting. The guy starts by saying if he had cancer he'd drive a truck into these data centers and hope it would blow up 70% of the internet. The FBI guys then follow up with him "So are you going to do it yet", "Have you picked a target yet", and "I have some bombs you can use" (not exact quotes but approximate). When he drives out to take a look at the site they arrest him. Maybe this guy would've gone on to commit the same crime on his own. Maybe he would've connected with real terrorists who would've motivated him the same way the FBI did. I doubt it though - this is the FBI's retelling and we can kind of see hints of manipulation. Plus, the FBI arrests way more of these bombers than "get through". Is that because the FBI are hypervigilant and super effective, or because they are growing their own terrorists and arresting them?
  - llamataboot 6y ago
    Pretty standard - sometimes even provide the technical know-how and the materials along with the urging
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    I strongly doubt he could have pulled off the Amazon incident he was envisioning. However, before the FBI inserted itself into his life, our twitwit gave strong, consistent messaging that harm needed to be done and that it was his patriotic duty to facilitate it. It appears that drumpounding rhetoric, about his America being in imminent danger, heavily shaped his thinking. Those messages were translating into drives to escalate his behavior in a harmful way. Given no changes, some sort of violent action seems an unsurprising outcome.
    - deleted 6y ago
sitkack 6y ago
If we know someone is going to commit a crime like this, shouldn't we just go talk to them and say, "hey, I know you are frustrated, I have scheduled some time with someone to talk about it" A thousand years from now I sure hope we aren't setting up dumb traps for the people that need help.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  I'm reposting a quote from our guy "But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully." There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?
  - shard972 6y ago
    nah they are probs racist
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    > There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go? All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.
    - goodlinks 6y ago
      Agree so much! having billions of individual intelligences running around with the ability to kill each other is actually hard to manage. Change management is what makes organisations work, great processes or systems are just a bonus.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
My take is - for once - the FBI didn't handcraft a terror threat out of a twit who'd otherwise do nothing of note. Our twit seems to have been earnestly trying to puzzle out how to do harm - and been clear about why (he believes) harm needs to be done. Using the screen name Dionysus, he posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups, about his plan to “conduct a little experiment” in 2021. “I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” Pendley wrote. “But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.” Our twit also claims to have been part of the Jan 6 insurrection. On January 11, 2021, he told an associate on Facebook that he went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, made it to the platform where he interacted with police officers but did not enter the building. He told another associate on Facebook that he had taken a piece of glass from a window at the building.* ref: https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biography-13-things-about-wichita-falls-texas-man/ https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biograp...
- jl2718 6y ago
  This in a world where it was fashionable for celebrities to perform mock assassinations of the President. You’re suggesting a world where a person’s thoughts can be used as evidence of their criminality. Perhaps there was more to this case, but this is what you write as convincing to you. Thoughts and words. And the same people that would imprison a wrong-thinker of the opposing political tribe, are protesting against police mistreatment of chronic violent criminals. Somehow I’m unconvinced of your sincerity. But I understand it. Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts spread faster than any disease, and the infected can’t ever be cured. They start movements and religions and wars. When asked who was the most evil person ever, it’s never a mindless antisocial killer, it’s always a person who beguiled a nation to fall in love with their thoughts. But I think this is a symptom of leisure. Perhaps you’ve never realized how little regard some people have for your life. There would be no speech, no argument, no justification, no anger, no reason, no ideology, no remorse, maybe just a little bit of amusement at how easy it was. And this is thousands of times more likely that any harm to come of some idiot lone wolf extremist of any ideology.
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
> Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad. It's still incredible how in this country, even more so after what's happened recently (not to mention all of the events stretching back through the 1990s) that domestic terroristic threats are lightly and jokingly brushed off by so many in society, while any other form of terrorism is asked to be dealt with with the full brunt of the law. It's incredible to watch. Someone with a specific plot to blow up a complex of buildings, goes and purchases materials to do it, and it's laughed off with a crayon joke... The double standards of this country.

d-d 6y ago

A more direct approach to serverless technology.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dahdum 6y ago

We’ll see in trial, but based on this article it doesn’t look like the FBI groomed this guy to commit a crime, but someone handed him off to an undercover agent after he was intent on doing it. That’s nice to see.

more_corn 6y ago

Destroying one AZ in one region would not (should not?) take down a single AWS customer. ALB are multi AZ, it's trivial to deploy services across azs. Everyone should be ok. Although I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test where they actually bring one down so who knows if regional services would come out unscathed. How pissed off do you think he's going to be when he learns that not only was the bomb fake, even if he had a bomb it would have amounted to little more than a disaster recovery test?

QuinnyPig 6y ago
In larger regions, single AZs span multiple buildings. He'd have had to basically raze 100 square miles of northern Virginia...
- rafale 6y ago
  It would make more sense to target internet "backbone" routers, no?
kevinventullo 6y ago
I would not be at all surprised if AWS periodically tests bringing down a whole AZ. Facebook has been doing this for years.
cheeze 6y ago
> I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test I wouldn't be so sure about that.
- sombremesa 6y ago
  Some disaster tests end up being initiated by a typo in a command.
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
And I don't think the three letter agencies are on AWS anyway...

glitchcrab 6y ago

It's _always_ us-east-1

hanklazard 6y ago

What percentage of users on MyMilitia are actually FBI? Or do they just own the backend? Hard to imagine this website isn’t a honeypot ...

udhdhxnxn 6y ago
50% FBI 50% ATF
0xy 6y ago
Pretty much all militia groups have been infiltrated by the FBI or other agencies. The KKK is pretty well known to be stacked with fed agent provocateurs like Gary Thomas Rowe. He pushed other members into violence and attacks on other groups and individuals, while being paid by the FBI.
barbacoa 6y ago
It has been rumored that the leader of the proud boys is an fbi informant. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-fbi-informant https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-l... After 9/11 the fbi sent all kinds of informants into mosques to honeypot people into fake terrorist plots, it would now seem to serve the current political winds to do it to people on the right.
- zikzak 6y ago
  This info is solely based on podcasts focused on legally matters but I think it is very common for the FBI to stop by someone's home and have a talk with them about how thier online rhetoric and personal associations have put them on a list of people that they are keeping thier eye on. For many people, this is enough to convince them it's time to cool thier jets (again, this is my impression as a layman). I think this happens far more often than "he has a barn full of fertilizer and diesel and now he's calling rental places to reserve a big panel truck so let's shut it down"...
  - CodeWriter23 6y ago
    I think if the FBI thinks someone is a threat, the last thing they do is let the suspect know they are on to him.

geoduck14 6y ago

That's not how this works! That's not how ANY OF THIS WORKS!

HomeDeLaPot 6y ago
Right? One guy bombing a datacenter isn't going to take down 70% of the internet. The headline is a baldfaced lie.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/

jti107 6y ago

I've gotten a tour of data center and it's not like walking into an office building. Lot of armed guards, every building required key card and pin code.

sitkack 6y ago

This guy needs to know about BGP.

carnagecity786 6y ago

>FBI agents found in late January from another source Pendley contacted using the Signal encrypted messaging app that he was planning to use C-4 plastic explosives to attack Amazon's data centers in an attempt to kill "70% of the internet." How did they discover this? I thought signal was e2e encrypted?

bmiller2 6y ago
Own/compel one of the ends.
thrower123 6y ago
It's easy when you're one of the ends
poundofshrimp 6y ago
It is. The source must have reported the convo.
rasz 6y ago
FBI was on the other end of that e2e link trying to sell him the explosives, targets and motives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Bronx_terrorism_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Bronx_terrorism_plot
xxpor 6y ago
The vast majority of criminals' threat models are way out of whack. They think they need to use signal so the NSA can't vacuum up their data, while completely ignoring the threat that the other side of the convo is a fed already.

motorocool 6y ago

Mr robot boy