LulzSec Hackers betrayed by HideMyAss.com

It was last week, Cody Kretsinger, a 23 years old from Phoenix, Arizona that was allegedly involved in hacking Sony Pictures, got arrested and I was having a battle of the mind on how and what possible means that Feds used to track this guy down.

Well it now seems that what we should believe to be hiding our ass is now exposing our ass. HideMyAss.com allows you to surf anonymously online in complete privacy.

The indictment against Kretsinger says he used a proxy server to hide his identity while carrying out the attack. But it emerged that the site he allegedly used to disguise his identity cooperated with the Feds to track him down.

The details of how it all happened is not yet public, but Hidemyass blog said they had to cooperate with the police when a leaked IRC chat logs that was released, exposed the participants of using various VPN service which their's were among.

It first came to our attention when leaked IRC chat logs were released, in these logs participants discussed about various VPN services they use, and it became apparent that some members were using our service. No action was taken, after all there was no evidence to suggest wrongdoing and nothing to identify which accounts with us they were using. At a later date it came as no surprise to have received a court order asking for information relating to an account associated with some or all of the above cases. As stated in our terms of service and privacy policy our service is not to be used for illegal activity, and as a legitimate company we will cooperate with law enforcement if we receive a court order (equivalent of a subpoena in the US).

You can be sure that HideMyAss is not the only provider to be hit with subpoenas and essentially being forced to hand over user data. It’s likely the FBI and other officials are digging deep and requesting similar information from other VPN providers and online services such as Pastebin, Twitter, and other tools and web services commonly used by hackers.

Full indictment is below:

Cody Andrew Kretsinger Indictment