LIGATT honestly and truly scares me
If you haven’t already heard about LIGATT security, you need to. I won’t do them a favor of linking to them from this blog post, but I would like to provide some information about why I’m afraid of them. No, it’s not because they have the world’s #1 hacker.
There is a lot of terrific information about the company, its misgivings and wrongdoings on attrition.org’s Charlatan page for Gregory Evans, the LIGATT founder and CEO. Convicted of wire fraud in the beginning of last decade, Mr. Evans made good upon his release from prison by… marketing a caller ID spoofing service starting two days after the US House of Representatives made caller ID spoofing illegal.
Another fantastic resource is the book review issued today by Ben Rothke on Gregory Evans’ book How To Become The Worlds No. 1 Hacker. In the review, Rothke explains:
In short, this is merely a work of cut and paste. In the parts of the book where the author attempts to write original text, it’s ripe with various errors. I could list many such errors, but why bother… But the real offense is the author’s blatant use of unattributed sources. I am not talking about a paragraph here or there, it is about wholesale plagiarism, often taking the form of an entire chapter.
So what scares me about them? No, it’s not that they have the “#1 hacker for hire”. I’m more scared of my own employees than this joker. It’s because they are a marketing machine that is escaping the ire of the media. In fact, they’re getting fluff pieces on Fox News and publicizing frightening commercials, taking out full page ads in hakin9 magazine, talking on radio stations, and issuing press releases and ALL CAPS tweets regularly. There’s even a movement to get LIGATT profiled on Oprah.
They proclaim on their front page “LIGATT Security is a leader in cyber security.” If anyone treats and respects this company as a “leader” it will put the community of hard working information security professionals many steps behind. Organizations like this give the whole security community a bad rap.
21 thoughts on “LIGATT honestly and truly scares me”
While we’re on the subject of plagiarism, the blog Bruce links to from Counterpane (Miles to Go…) which you link to from “frightening commercials” took a direct copy of our post on the LIGATT commercial:
http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/05/best-information-security-commercial-evah/
Life imitates art 😉
Prefect – I just linked Schneier because I didn’t want to send any traffic LIGATT’s way. I’ll update my link to point to your page instead!
Thanks Peter, but you don’t have to, Bruce fixed his link.
Why you hatin’? We just make information security look gooood!
@FakeLIGATT
check out his latest post on LIGATT: Fair use, plagiarism and the World’s No. 1 Hacker book
https://365.rsaconference.com/blogs/securityreading/2010/06/14/fair-use-plagiarism-and-the-world-s-no-1-hacker-book
LIGATT never was the cyber provider for Atlanta Hawks or Thrashers. 100% fiction.
Read the links from Bruce and Praetorian Prefect… It just keeps getting better. You can listen to Gregory Evans’ own ravings on his site, and the article also accuses the computer security industry of being racist. No, we’re not racist. We are calling you a lying miscreant penny-stock pumping plagiarist. Those aren’t racist terms.
I firmly believe he focuses all his eneergy on media and press releases because it’s largely a penny stock scam with the added bonus of selling dupes on some horrible services and poor products.
What’s his side of the story? I was trying to figure out if this operation was legit or not, and I found out Ligatt did provide cyber security for Philips Arena, not the Hawks or Thrashers.
I read a great amount of information accusing Mr. Gregory Evans of Plagiarism. What college Mr Rothke graduate from? He seems very clever yet a bit hard on this fellow Gregory Evans. How in the world does he have time to be all the things listed on his web page profile? And please tell me what the significance of baseball and aviation is in his personal profile? Is he a professional baseball player? What exactly did he do in aviation? His list of credentials is so long it makes me a bit suspicious of him. Some of his credentials seem repetitive. Oh and is it his job to expose people even when the person or entity plagiarized against have not made a formal complaint? I believe that we need more proof that this Mr. Rothke’s credentials before we believe his post about Mr. Evans.
Just reading your post Osagioduwabenin. The guy Rothke wrote a book but there was a comment at this link that did mention he is redundant.
http://securitymusings.com/article/1950/ligatt-honestly-and-truly-scares-me/comment-page-1#comment-42627
Headline about these guys:
“LIGATT Security International and Gregory Evans Sue Alleged Stock Bashers Chris Riley, Nisha Kappor, Ben Rothke, Randolph Morris and More for Alleged Stock Manipulation”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/LIGATT-Security-International-pz-2806570228.html?x=0&.v=1
Check out the name list:
The defendants are as follow: John Doe 1 A/K/A BRENTSKI98503, John Doe 2 A/K/A DOUBLEDOWN22, John Doe 3 A/K/A U_BEEN_EXPOSED, John Doe 4 A/K/A E_COMMA_KID, John Doe 5 A/K/A PENNYCHECKER, John Doe 6 A/K/A MARINE-1, John Doe 7 A/K/A SHAWNF, John Doe 8 A/K/A DHDOLPHNS, John Doe 9 A/K/A MAUI, John Doe 10 A/K/A BOOGERS, John Doe 11 A/K/A 20PLUS, John Doe 12 A/K/A NAUGHTY GIRL, John Doe 13 A/K/A @-@, John Doe 14 A/K/A RTCLAUS, John Doe 15 A/K/A CREATIVE IDEA FACTORY, John Doe 16 A/K/A RANDOLPH MORRIS, John Doe 17 A/K/A CHRIS JOHN RILEY, John Doe 18 A/K/A BEN ROTHKE, John Doe 19 A/K/A 3_COM_KID, John Doe 20 A/K/A CRABBYOLBASTARD, John Doe 21, John Doe 22, John Doe 23, John Doe 24, John Doe 25, and GREY MCKENZIE.
I’d just like to note that “Osagioduwabenin” and “dom_filmingo” posted within an hour of each other… from the exact same AT&T IP address in Atlanta. “Brad” also posted a few hours before from that IP, then more recently “Gene” posted from it. At least one other site has been seeing similar patterns in comments on their Ligatt stories.
And now I’ve confirmed that the IP address used in comments here as noted was also the source of comments on another blog’s Ligatt posts and was the source IP for an e-mail sent from a Ligatt assistant to another website.
Hi there Ligatt folks, thanks for posting comments to our blog. Ben Rothke is a security speaker and writer, who has actually written a book (as opposed to cobbled one together from unattributed sources). You may have seen him speak at a conference, if you had been actually a part of the security community and come to those conferences. His book Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know contains some information that Ligatt folks should pay attention to, such as “Practice Safe Access” and most importantly, “Call the experts when things go wrong.” On that note, our contact information can be had on the top right of this page. Best regards,
–Peter Hesse, President, Gemini Security Solutions
The following names, email & IP addresses were recently used to post on our blog, presumably by Ligatt or their confidants. Our policy dictates we will not share email addresses publicly, so I will give just the first part of the email.
Gene | steinbrecher@ | 72.151.116.19
dom_filmingo | bzachary58@ | 72.151.116.19
Osagioduwabenin | hacxrus@ | 72.151.116.19
Brad | xandureever9845@ | 72.151.116.19
LOL You would think the “world’s no.1 hacker” would at least know how to use tor. He must not have gotten to that chapter in Hacking for Dummies.
LIGATT SECURITY INTERNATIONAL ROCKS, THANKS FOR THAT INFORMATION. I AM LEARNING SO MUCH ABOUT GREGORY EVANS AND I THINK THE GUY IS EXTREMELY UNIQUE TO HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE FOCUSED ON HIM…THAT’S REALLY SOMETHING.
Hey, Mr or Ms administrator do you have anymore information like that above?
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