HBGary Federal, a security services company helping the FBI to unmask the members of hacktivist secret group Anonymous, have withdrawn its participation from RSA Conference, a security conference because of threats of real-world attacks on its employees.
Cyber security specialists and national security officials are in San Francisco this week discuss attacks on "smart" power grids, blocking attacks on smartphones and computer tablets and other security threats.
According to a statement on HBGary Federal’s website, its employees have been receiving threatening messages since Anonymous hacked data from its computers earlier this month, reported AFP.
The company said, "In addition to the data theft, HBGary individuals have received numerous threats of violence, including threats at our tradeshow booth."
"In an effort to protect our employees, customers and the RSA Conference community, HBGary has decided to remove our booth and cancel all talks."
Earlier this month, hackers from Anonymous, best-known for attacks on Scientology and Wikileaks detractors, had hacked into HBGary’s website and posted an image containing a message explaining their actions.
They downloaded over 60,000 messages from the company’s email servers and posted them on The Pirate Bay.
The Twitter account of HBGary’s CEO, Aaron Barr, was also compromised and used to tweet a number of offensive messages, as well as his home address, social security number and mobile phone number.
This happened after Financial Times had quoted Barr as saying that he had identified two key members of Anonymous, including a co-founder in the US along with senior members in Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Australia.
Last year, Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Visa, PayPal and others in support of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
The HBGary hack was more sophisticated than the previous DDoS attacks according to the reports.
