Hacked and now of vandalism, RSA HBGary pulls out

California security company at the center of a controversy over a plan to discredit WikiLeaks and his supporters abruptly pulled itself outside the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco this week, citing security concerns.

The company's subsidiary, HBGary federal, canceled a speech that had planned to give Internet activist group, anonymous. Was the news of this speech that riled up anonymous and precipitate the controversy last week.

HBGary has been under fire for several days now after their own websites, the corporate e-mail system and Twitter accounts were hacked and details of a business proposal to discredit WikiLeaks society were sent to the Internet. Apparently, the attack was launched by Anonymous in reply to talk about CEO Aaron Barr of HBGary federal, which had been scheduled for Monday morning. Barr said that he had discovered the identity of many of the leaders of anonymous and had planned to discuss his investigation in a speech to the Conference BSides San Francisco, which runs in tandem with RSA.

Barr, "I was receiving death threats," he said in an interview Tuesday. "There was a lot of talk that was being formed in anonymous harassing us IRC channels at our booth and sending people to heckle [HBGary speakers of the Conference]."

The company has decided to strike at RSA Conference booth from the floor, however, after that it was vandalized on Sunday, said Jim Butterworth, Vice-President of HBGary services. "We ... came back the next morning and was very obvious that the group responsible for the activities in the news had decided to make another statement," he said.

The IDG News service obtained a photo of booth broken HBGary. Someone had put a large poster paper at the stand of HBGary that read, "anonymous ... in it 4 the lulz.. " Lulz is Ride ' Internet slang meaning.»

Instead of a stand of the exhibition, HBGary's place on the floor is now empty RSA show, except for a small sign saying the company has decided to withdraw from the show.

HBGary founder Greg Hoglund had been scheduled to speak at RSA, but those talks have now been cancelled too, Barr said. He declined to comment further controversy for his work, or the cyber attacks in his company.

But according to the published email company, Barr knew last month that his speech would make HBGary a target.

Clearly, however, has no idea how bad things would get. HBGary--less protection but once-respected society-ben--has now suffered what could be a fatal blow to its reputation.

For a security company to suffer a similar breach is embarrassing, but buried in email 67000 society published by Anonymous had even more bad material as a proposal to help the right of Bank of America company, Hunton & Williams, discredit WikiLeaks in front of the awaited release of secret documents. In the proposal, Barr has suggested that HBGary Federal could work with two other security companies--Palantir technologies Berico--and to launch it, seed WikiLeaks with forged documents and dig dirt and his supporters.

BofA publicly distanced itself from HBGary after the incident, while Palantir technologies Berico have cut off and ties with the company.

Robert McMillan covers the security of your computer and General technology breaking news for the IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at @ bobmcmillan. E-mail address is robert_mcmillan@idg.com, Robert