FBI arrests man for plan to kill 70% of Internet in AWS bomb attack | Hacker News Reader

FBI arrests man for plan to kill 70% of Internet in AWS bomb attack

bleepingcomputer.com

116 pointsel_duderino53 comments

First thought when I see the headline is another case of the FBI "catching" a bomber that they gave the bomb to.

Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad.

Not quite - this time it seems like the person was already stating they were planning to blow up the data centers. Slightly different from the other FBI idiocies which are closer to "this person said they hate amazon, lets radicalize them until they want a bomb"

Maybe I'm misreading the criminal complaint but it seems like he says something like "If I had cancer I'd drive a truck into their data center and blow it up" and the FBI informants encouraged him and offered the bombs.

How was that grooming? He already had all the plans and was after the explosives. Someone just contacted the FBI and got him arrested. Do you see any evidence the FBI told him he should bomb those buildings and then arrested him for it?

I think it's pretty likely the FBI convinced him to attempt to carry out this attack, to the extent that he did. For one, that's pretty much the standard FBI tactic - convince the mentally unwell to agree to something criminal and then arrest them for it. For another, the criminal complaint linked in the article kind of suggests this.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20612508-pendley-ble...

Read points 18-21 especially though the whole thing is interesting. The guy starts by saying if he had cancer he'd drive a truck into these data centers and hope it would blow up 70% of the internet. The FBI guys then follow up with him "So are you going to do it yet", "Have you picked a target yet", and "I have some bombs you can use" (not exact quotes but approximate). When he drives out to take a look at the site they arrest him.

Maybe this guy would've gone on to commit the same crime on his own. Maybe he would've connected with real terrorists who would've motivated him the same way the FBI did. I doubt it though - this is the FBI's retelling and we can kind of see hints of manipulation. Plus, the FBI arrests way more of these bombers than "get through". Is that because the FBI are hypervigilant and super effective, or because they are growing their own terrorists and arresting them?

Pretty standard - sometimes even provide the technical know-how and the materials along with the urging

I strongly doubt he could have pulled off the Amazon incident he was envisioning.

However, before the FBI inserted itself into his life, our twitwit gave strong, consistent messaging that harm needed to be done and that it was his patriotic duty to facilitate it.

It appears that drumpounding rhetoric, about his America being in imminent danger, heavily shaped his thinking. Those messages were translating into drives to escalate his behavior in a harmful way. Given no changes, some sort of violent action seems an unsurprising outcome.

If we know someone is going to commit a crime like this, shouldn't we just go talk to them and say, "hey, I know you are frustrated, I have scheduled some time with someone to talk about it"

A thousand years from now I sure hope we aren't setting up dumb traps for the people that need help.

I'm reposting a quote from our guy

"But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully."

There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?

> There are many, many heads in the US, experiencing the same sort of concerns that this guy did. With whom should we have conversations and how should those conversations go?

All of them. And not just via government, or the non-existent mental health authorities, but neighbours, acquaintances, and passers-by. Increase social welfare spending, sure, but also, people should be kinder, more empathetic, and look out for one-another. This could be as simple as striking up conversations with strangers, or people outside our wealth bubble. It could mean volunteering for a charity. We're all complicit in the propagation of bad ideas, and the decline in community, and we can't always lean on systems to fix it for us.

Agree so much! having billions of individual intelligences running around with the ability to kill each other is actually hard to manage.

Change management is what makes organisations work, great processes or systems are just a bonus.

Blaming has a lower activation energy than changing, which is our critical flaw.

That's a big if. We can punish, prevent through vigilance, and intervene when possible, it's not zero sum. Ideally a conspiracy charge and some reformation would help the guy see the error of his ways and be a vocal proponent of mental health services. That's the goal of all "re-education" programs though, and we're a little culturally opposed to that.

I like your idea because it's utopian, and I like the idea of striving for utopia, but in the real world therapists aren't gods and aren't mind readers and can't actually stop someone from killing other people, so it isn't really clear what the "success rate" of your solution might be.

On the other hand, imprisoning people, which is arguably dystopian, has a 100% success rate of preventing people from harming the general population, at least as long as they're in prison.

My take is - for once - the FBI didn't handcraft a terror threat out of a twit who'd otherwise do nothing of note. Our twit seems to have been earnestly trying to puzzle out how to do harm - and been clear about why (he believes) harm needs to be done.

Using the screen name Dionysus, he posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups, about his plan to “conduct a little experiment” in 2021.

“I’m not a dumbass suicide bomber,” Pendley wrote. “But even if I only have a handful of fellow patriots standing beside me, I will happily die a young man knowing that I didn’t allow the evils in this world to continue unjustly treating my fellow Americans so disrespectfully.”

Our twit also claims to have been part of the Jan 6 insurrection.

On January 11, 2021, he told an associate on Facebook that he went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, made it to the platform where he interacted with police officers but did not enter the building. He told another associate on Facebook that he had taken a piece of glass from a window at the building.*

ref: https://conandaily.com/2021/04/09/seth-aaron-pendley-biograp...

This in a world where it was fashionable for celebrities to perform mock assassinations of the President.

You’re suggesting a world where a person’s thoughts can be used as evidence of their criminality. Perhaps there was more to this case, but this is what you write as convincing to you. Thoughts and words.

And the same people that would imprison a wrong-thinker of the opposing political tribe, are protesting against police mistreatment of chronic violent criminals. Somehow I’m unconvinced of your sincerity.

But I understand it. Thoughts are dangerous. Thoughts spread faster than any disease, and the infected can’t ever be cured. They start movements and religions and wars. When asked who was the most evil person ever, it’s never a mindless antisocial killer, it’s always a person who beguiled a nation to fall in love with their thoughts.

But I think this is a symptom of leisure. Perhaps you’ve never realized how little regard some people have for your life. There would be no speech, no argument, no justification, no anger, no reason, no ideology, no remorse, maybe just a little bit of amusement at how easy it was. And this is thousands of times more likely that any harm to come of some idiot lone wolf extremist of any ideology.

This reads like some V for Vendetta fan fiction.

Thoughts (intent) can absolutely be used as evidence of someone's criminality.

Interesting. The intent was the opposite, as in, support of small-time street law enforcement dealing with chronic violent criminals, versus fear-mongering about extremists. Although I admit I’ve neither watched that movie nor read the OP article (forum foul; I know). I did spent a good portion of my life hunting terrorists, and along the way there are always to be found plenty of unquestionably terrible people that are clearly under no conviction that they are in any way serving some greater purpose. These are not very interesting and all too common. They’re so dumb and simple you can’t even hate them, and there are no medals for removing them from society. People want diabolical comic book superhero-villain stories. I’m not sure it works out that way. If it was as simple as taking out a few bad apples, we wouldn’t be permanently embroiled in multi-trillion dollar decades-long conflicts that end up doing exactly what I was talking about, peacekeeping through local police to establish law and order and sustainable communities. So when I see these spectacles at home, I think of when the old gunny admonished me, “We are not authorized to target any US person. No American is ever supposed to be the enemy.” It’s not exactly the same, but, it just seems like our first public mutual responsibility is to get all of our citizens to feel like they at least belong here, and believe that they can find ways to peacefully make small consensus steps toward some of the things they believe in, just as they may also make small concessions for the beliefs of others. People with coherent beliefs about something are nearly perfect examples of the easily-reformed. Thoughts can lead someone back to peace. Impulsive violence and exploitation of others, often from substance abuse, is nearly incurable. This is the real enemy.

> Read the article and the complaint and it's the FBI grooming another useful idiot while patting themselves on the back. I'm just picturing this kid with his hand drawn crayon maps of the AWS buildings and talking bout "70% of the internet" and "oligarchy". Funny but sad.

It's still incredible how in this country, even more so after what's happened recently (not to mention all of the events stretching back through the 1990s) that domestic terroristic threats are lightly and jokingly brushed off by so many in society, while any other form of terrorism is asked to be dealt with with the full brunt of the law.

It's incredible to watch.

Someone with a specific plot to blow up a complex of buildings, goes and purchases materials to do it, and it's laughed off with a crayon joke...

The double standards of this country.

What percentage of users on MyMilitia are actually FBI? Or do they just own the backend?

Hard to imagine this website isn’t a honeypot ...

Pretty much all militia groups have been infiltrated by the FBI or other agencies. The KKK is pretty well known to be stacked with fed agent provocateurs like Gary Thomas Rowe. He pushed other members into violence and attacks on other groups and individuals, while being paid by the FBI.

It has been rumored that the leader of the proud boys is an fbi informant.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/proud-boys-l...

After 9/11 the fbi sent all kinds of informants into mosques to honeypot people into fake terrorist plots, it would now seem to serve the current political winds to do it to people on the right.

This info is solely based on podcasts focused on legally matters but I think it is very common for the FBI to stop by someone's home and have a talk with them about how thier online rhetoric and personal associations have put them on a list of people that they are keeping thier eye on. For many people, this is enough to convince them it's time to cool thier jets (again, this is my impression as a layman).

I think this happens far more often than "he has a barn full of fertilizer and diesel and now he's calling rental places to reserve a big panel truck so let's shut it down"...

I think if the FBI thinks someone is a threat, the last thing they do is let the suspect know they are on to him.

Destroying one AZ in one region would not (should not?) take down a single AWS customer. ALB are multi AZ, it's trivial to deploy services across azs. Everyone should be ok.

Although I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test where they actually bring one down so who knows if regional services would come out unscathed.

How pissed off do you think he's going to be when he learns that not only was the bomb fake, even if he had a bomb it would have amounted to little more than a disaster recovery test?

In larger regions, single AZs span multiple buildings. He'd have had to basically raze 100 square miles of northern Virginia...

It would make more sense to target internet "backbone" routers, no?

I would not be at all surprised if AWS periodically tests bringing down a whole AZ. Facebook has been doing this for years.

> I'm sure AWS has not done a disaster test

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Some disaster tests end up being initiated by a typo in a command.

And I don't think the three letter agencies are on AWS anyway...

FBI on AWS => https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/11/fbis-counte...

CIA on AWS => https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/aws-cvo-blg-aws-govcloud-servi...

NSA on AWS => https://techbeacon.com/security/nsaarmys-inscom-leaks-top-se...

I stand corrected. Then again the NSA one doesn't seem to be an officially sanctioned placing of data, and in the CIA article it says the CIA cloud is not connected to the Internet, and is located on-premise (i.e. CIA headquarters).

Trying to bomb the CIA HQ would be an even more ballsy move...

The idea of using a cloud provider for critical stuff freaks me out but I keep hearing people I respect argue for it (often from an angle of "we can't afford to scale for certain large attacks without this.")

Plenty of AWS customers test bringing down an entire AZ on the regular. I know of 2 large companies that test switching entire regions.

Previously the easiest way to bring down an entire AWS Region involved just waiting for AWS to take down the region on you. They stopped using VA as their guinea pig, but they took it down so many times that many of us started spanning across multiple regions. Only very naive serious users would be in just one region, let alone AZ at this point, so I highly doubt this plan would've taken down 70% of the internet.

Amazon certainly did DR tests like that, shutting down entire datacenters, back before AWS had AZs. Jesse Robbins used to run them. Once a small tornado from a Hurricane remnant (2005 or 2006 season) took out power completely to one of the smaller east coast datacenters.

It's _always_ us-east-1

We’ll see in trial, but based on this article it doesn’t look like the FBI groomed this guy to commit a crime, but someone handed him off to an undercover agent after he was intent on doing it. That’s nice to see.

A more direct approach to serverless technology.

That's not how this works! That's not how ANY OF THIS WORKS!

Right? One guy bombing a datacenter isn't going to take down 70% of the internet. The headline is a baldfaced lie.

https://xkcd.com/908/

I've gotten a tour of data center and it's not like walking into an office building. Lot of armed guards, every building required key card and pin code.

This guy needs to know about BGP.

Mr robot boy

>FBI agents found in late January from another source Pendley contacted using the Signal encrypted messaging app that he was planning to use C-4 plastic explosives to attack Amazon's data centers in an attempt to kill "70% of the internet."

How did they discover this? I thought signal was e2e encrypted?

Own/compel one of the ends.

It's easy when you're one of the ends

It is. The source must have reported the convo.

FBI was on the other end of that e2e link trying to sell him the explosives, targets and motives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Bronx_terrorism_plot

The vast majority of criminals' threat models are way out of whack. They think they need to use signal so the NSA can't vacuum up their data, while completely ignoring the threat that the other side of the convo is a fed already.

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