Aaron Barr – the former CEO of HBGary Federal – was infamously pwned by Anonymous after attempting to infiltrate and discredit the hacktivist collective.
But that didn’t stop Barr from dying his hair blue and visiting the OccupyWallStreet protest on September 17, a movement which is heavily promoted and coordinated by his former nemesis.
“[It’s really quite] fascinating to me,” Barr told an IDG Newscorrespondent on the sidelines of an RSA conference in London.
“I see an immense parallel between what is happening right now and the protest movements of the ’60s.”
According to Barr, Anonymous is a “complex” entity, as it exerted a positive influence on events in Egypt and Tunisia, but also harbors a “dark side,” because of the actions the collective took against him and Sony.
However, Barr emphasized that he remains open to engaging in dialogue with the group and still follows several Anonymous accounts on Twitter.
“I just kind of want to rip off the scab, deal with the issue and show people, ‘listen this conversation can happen’ between me and a group that attacked me… I may not want to drink a beer with them, but we can get through this,” he added.
The former Navy cryptologist currently works for Sayres & Associates and lectures about incident response/malware analysis.
