Previously unpublished chat logs between Hector Xavier Monsegur, the super-hacker known as “Sabu”, and fellow members of the Anonymous collective have revealed the vast scale of breaches Monsegur orchestrated on government and business websites in Brazil at a time when he was acting as an informant for the FBI.



The suspicion has long been floated that the FBI may have used Monsegur to instigate cyber-attacks by a network of international hackers on foreign governments and commercial targets. The claim was raised by another prominent Anonymous and LulzSec hacker, Jeremy Hammond, as he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

But the newly-published chats, which are under seal in the US federal courts but were obtained by Vice’s online magazine Motherboard, give chapter and verse on how Monsegur directly incited Anonymous hackers to attack Brazilian sites. The targets included the server of the Brazilian federal military policy, other government sites, the media empire Globo and hundreds of commercial outlets.

“Hit these bitches for our Brazilian squad,” Monsegur told Hammond in a private chat disclosed by Motherboard. In another he said: “Work on the gov.”

The Vice report, written by Daniel Stuckey and Andrew Blake, also reveals that Monsegur was aware of the huge scale of what he was fomenting.

“What we are doing is so massive,” he wrote to Hammond.

The targeting of foreign sites was “something WikiLeaks couldn’t have done”. Yet Monsegur encouraged all these actions after he was approached by FBI agents in his Manhattan apartment on 7 June 2011, at which point he immediately turned informant, as the US government has itself confirmed.

Such were the lengths to which the FBI went to monitor Monsegur’s online activities over the following months, including setting up cameras in his apartment, that it is unlikely anything the hacker-turned-informant did would have gone unnoticed by his official handlers.

Monsegur, whose work as an informant helped to convict Hammond and at least seven other prominent Anonymous hackers in the US, UK and Ireland, was allowed by a federal judge last month to walk free on time served. The judge, Loretta Preska, repeatedly praised Monsegur for his “extraordinary cooperation” with the FBI.

The Motherboard chats show that Monsegur pointed an inner circle of AntiSec hackers towards Brazilian sites that could be breached, as well as passing on details of targets to a network of hackers operating inside the country.

“I’m about to get brazillians [sic] to go in a rampage,” he said to Hammond in one private chat.

In a chat with a different unidentified hacker, Monsegur said: “we gave them root on brazils biggest media site globo. So lets see how they handle it.”

In January 2012, seven months into his new role as FBI informant, Sabu sent a hacker going by the internet handle “hard366” a long list of potential targets attached to the domain .gov.br .

According to the Motherboard disclosures, Monsegur told the hacker: “do whatever you want, its yours brother… this is a real server ready for defacement.”