On Friday, a federal grand jury in Dallas indicted Barrett Brown, a former self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesperson, for trafficking “stolen authentication features,” as well as "access device fraud" and “aggravated identity theft.” Brown has been detained since he was arrested in September for allegedly threatening a federal agent.
10 counts of the 12 count indictment concern the aggravated identity theft charge (the indictment references 10 people from whom Brown is alleged to have stolen information), but the most interesting charge is probably the first; a single count saying Brown, “did knowingly traffic in more than five authentication features knowing that such features were stolen and produced without lawful authority.” But rather than a physical back-alley hand-off, this alleged trafficking happened online when Barrett transferred a hyperlink, “from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel called '#Anonops' to an IRC channel under Brown's control, called '#ProjectPM.'”
That hyperlink happened to include over 5,000 credit card numbers, associating Ids, and Card Verification Values (CVVs) from the Stratfor Global Intelligence database.
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