By William Knowles @c4i

Senior Editor

InfoSec News

February 28, 2013

On February 22nd, 2014 the EC-Council website was broken into and defaced by Eugene Belford (a.k.a. The Plague). For those of you living in a cave, or a compound outside of Abbottabad for the last 13 years, The EC-Council is an Albuquerque New Mexico based organization that offers security professionals a reasonably inexpensive certificate among other security certificates. to be compliant with DoD 8570. The website was defaced, and its content was replaced with a picture of Edward Snowden, and an HTML comment that gives away the identity of the “hacker” that compromised the EC-Council website.

After EC-Council wrestled back control of their site, a known password was reused, and two days later re-defaced the website showing the mail from Edward Snowden’s Yokota Air Base e-mail asking for an exam code, a copy of his U.S. Passport and a letter from John A. Niescier, an Information Security Officer with the Department of Defense Special Representative, Japan stating that he has verified Edward J. Snowden has at least five years professional information security experience in the required domains.

After the hacker mentioned “P.S It seems like lots of you are missing the point here, I’m sitting on thousands of passports belonging to LE (and .mil) officials” conspiracy rumors were swirling about who may have attacked the EC-Council website. Foreign training companies, secret squirrels, the Chinese, Russians, non-state actors.

On February 25th, EC-Council website was defaced a third time.

(Screenshot credit: @JamieCaitlin)

The folks at r000t’s Blag have found done some digging and on the surface, it’s pretty damning evidence.

As we’re unable to confirm this independently, read this first article: Who Hacked EC-Council?

Then read this second article: Inside Eugene’s Gibson (EC-Council, Part II)

Its NSFW – Not Safe For Work reading, but when has that stopped you in the past in the name of security research?

Since the EC-Council has been mum on whether or not there has been a massive disclosure of passports, drivers licenses, and CAC cards, I can promise you after reading the above articles, you will be angry at the U.S. Federal Law Enforcement community as it seems they have had this hacker in custody before, but were unable to charge him/her at the time.

Maybe this will be the event that changes this mindset in the future.