A Brief Guide To The LIGATT Saga

Preamble

When I interviewed Greg for my podcast, I let him have his say without his views being misrepresented. I’ve wanted to write about the current furore for a while now, but I couldn’t decide on the best way to do it. I was in the process of writing a somewhat facetious limerick poem about the drama, but I decided instead to simply write and explain what happened. This is largely because of two reasons; nothing rhymes all that well with plagiarism and that it’s a genuinely serious subject. People have been falsely accused of racism and have been sent threats of violence for talking about LIGATT, and I ought to approach the subject with the seriousness that it deserves.

Besides a discussion on the subject on the next Student Hacker Information Technology Podcast episode, this will be the last time I talk about the subject (provided that Greg doesn’t do/say anything really stupid). Greg is just a troll, and you should never feed the trolls.

Introduction

Danny Kaye is regarded to be one of the best actors of all time. One of his most famous films was called ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’. It featured a dreamer and fantasist called Walter Mitty, who imagined himself in fantastic scenarios and adventures that simply weren’t true. We can make parallels between the character of Walter Mitty and Gregory D Evans, the CEO of LIGATT security international, who in recent weeks has caused an outburst of unprecedented anger in the information security industry on account of the fantastic and ultimately false stories he has woven about his own history and expertise in computer hacking; plagiarism of copyrighted texts without the consent of the authors; threats of violence to well established computer security professionals and false allegations of racism towards a number of prominent people in the computer security industry.

Greg Evans

Greg Evans is a fantastic story teller. Not unlike Walter Mittys fantasies of protecting priceless treasures and fighting Nazi’s, Greg has imagined himself as a former expert cracker gone good. Whilst it’s true that Greg Evans was sentenced to 24 months in jail along with a $9,000,000 fine for wire fraud and conspiracy against AT+t and MCI, much of his story doesn’t add up. He talks about developing a close friendship with Kevin Mitnik in jail, and advising him to take federal plea bargains, a claim that Kevin Mitnik flatly denies. Kevin, on a post on the popular micro blogging website, Twitter, says that he did not discuss hacking or his case with him, only his family and his lawyer.

Upon release from prison, Evans started a new company called LIGATT security, which currently trades for a fraction of a cent per share on the notoriously risky ‘pink sheet’ bulletin boards. Here, he offers a number of products which are aimed at making cyber security easier, or making online law enforcement easier. He also wrote a number of books that have had limited commercial success and has supposedly purchased a number of information security portals, one of which is called National Cyber Security and will be discussed later in the blog post.

How To Be The Worlds Number One Hacker

Greg Evans markets himself as the worlds greatest hacker. He has made youtube videos to the same extent which feature a montage of pictures of him in national and regional press to a backdrop of bad music. His book is titled How To Be The Worlds Number One Hacker, and has met mixed reviews. The book is written in the name of Gregory Evans, and does not mention any other authors or contributors than Gregory Evans. Unfortunately, it has received fierce criticism as a work of unmitigated plagiarism, with some sections of the book containing no original content whatsoever.

When I interviewed Greg Evans for the Student Hacker Information Technology Podcast, I asked him if his book contained sections that were plagiarized. He responded that he had paid for the sections that were not his own. Unfortunately, that has been flatly denied by the people whose content was plagiarized. It has certainly caused a great deal of uproar in the information security community, a tight knit community where people take care of each other and academic honesty is valued above all else.

National Cyber Security

National Cyber Security (which is not to be mistaken for National Cyber Security Division, a section of the US Government Department for Homeland Security, nor the National Cyber Security Alliance, nor the National Cyber Security Center), is a web portal for information security news owned by LIGATT Security International. It has faced severe criticism for plagiarism and unauthorized reproduction of content not owned by themselves. It’s important to note that the plagiarism in the LIGATT articles aren’t simply a paragraph here or there, but wholesale lifting of articles from other news sites.

It’s also important to note that NSC had what can best be described as ‘phantom reporters’. Seria Mullen, one of the supposed contributors to the blog happened to look an awful lot like Chloe White Kennedy, a reporter for Knox News. Another reporter, Grey McKenzie is virtually unknown other for his posts on NSS, and a virtually unmaintained twiter feed.

When the infosec community discovered the level of unauthorised appropriation, LIGATT went in to damage control mode, removing content and shutting down the website for periods at a time. Unfortunately for Greg the damage was done. National Cyber Security was exposed as a fraud, plain and simple.

Greg Strikes Back

Greg has been accused of sending death threats towards prominent podcaster, writer and computer security professional Chris John Riley. Whilst Chris was trying to arrange an interview with Greg for the Eurotrash Security Podcast, he raised the ire of Greg, causing him to leave a threat of violence on his blog post. It goes without saying that threats of violence are simply not acceptable in polite company, especially not in the computer security industry where ideas and knowledge is king. Hackers don’t threaten each other with violence. We share ideas in a public forum and then scrutinize them, just like a scientist shares data for others to peer review it.

Not content with threats of violence, he has also resorted to sullying the reputations of Ben Rothke and Chris John Riley with accusations of racism. Racism has no place within our society, and accusations of racism are serious indeed, and have the capacity to damage anybody’s reputation and career. Racism is nasty and damaging, and throwing around groundless accusations of racism is not only an insult to the genuine victims of racial prejudice,  it also places in jeopardy the careers and personal standing of the people accused of it.

With this in mind, it’s important to note that the two people accused of racism by Greg Evans are Ben Rothke and Chris John Riley, who are critics of LIGATT security and are most definitely not racist. Literary criticism is not synonymous with racism.

Greg Evans’ book was not criticised because of any prejudice against African Americans. Indeed, on the internet, race is irrelevant. If the internet was a country, it’d certainly be one of the least homogenous countries in the world. How To Be The Worlds Number One Hacker was criticised simply because it was filled with other people’s content, not to mention a boatload of grammatical and spelling errors.

For Greg Evans to make a press release accusing Chris John Riley and Ben Rothke of racism is not only an insult to the many people who have to live with racism as a day to day reality. It is also most certainly slander, and one can hope that one day, Greg sees the error of his ways and releases a full retraction and makes a sincere apology to those who have been affected by his lies.

Conclusion

Greg Evans is a charismatic, intelligent guy who certainly knows how to market effectively. He genuinely could do a lot of good, as he knows how to engage the media and market effectively. He could do a lot to enhance awareness of cyber security issues, instead of releasing shoddy books that were built on other people’s hard work and making threats of violence and false accusations of racism. Greg needs to repair the bridges he burned with his general silliness with a sincere, frank apology and restitution to those whose content he ripped off.

In The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, things work out in the end for Walter. It’s up to Greg Evans to decide how this saga ends.

Tags: attrition, Ben Rothke, chris john riley, greg evans, gregory d evans, Ligatt, national cyber security, plagiarism, seria mullen, shitcast, threats