“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist…. And like that he was gone.” – The Usual Suspects (1995)

Forty-eight hours and two leaks later, SpexSec’s members individually announced their retirement from hacking via Pastebin messages Tuesday afternoon. DecryptedTech documented the pair bickering with another well-known hacker on Twitter shortly before the announcements.

From Reckz0r, one half of the pair: “I was a former member of the hacktivist group known as Anonymous, UGNazi, and other paragons of hacking history. I made a group known as ‘SpexSecurity.’ I’ve realized that I am doing this shit for nothing. I am officially a whitehat. I will use my intelligence for good. I’ve done over 50 large hacks, and leaked many essential information, I am sorry if I harmed you, or affected your families. This is my departure from the hacking scene. I am no-longer a hacker, I’m a whitehat.”

c0mrade, the other half of SpexSec gave one last interview before going into retirement:

Whoa what just happened? Did you guys get hired? Recruited by the feds?
Somewhat. I have internal access to multiple Airlines. We’re going to do the right thing and cooperate with the dev’s on handling the issue. We did enough for the mad public. Don’t you think?

True. So what now? Only white hat and informing people of vulnerabilities?
I was the eye of the group. I did both attacks. I mean, I was itching to kill. I felt so insecure. I don’t know why. I thought to myself, “I could make a living out of this.” We stooped very, very low. Thing is man, I always worked alone. I wasn’t used to the media or attention. I knew the entire time that what we were doing was wrong, and I was telling myself, “I need to fucking stop” – and when you’ve got that much pressure put on you…bam…you just break, you know?

And this is not a bluff at all?
I’m not bluffing. I don’t know about @reckz0r, though. I WANT people to know about this, though. I want people to be able to sleep at night and I want to help benefit all these people we helped hurt. It’ll be hard to re-earn what we sacrificed, but fuck, it’ll be worth it in the end.

So what about the FBI and Augenbaum?  You know he’s still going to be trying to figure out who you are. Are you going to turn yourselves in at all?
Nope. We deleted the site and if you want me to be thorough, I patched the security hole myself right after I got in because I knew dozens of idiots were going to try to use it for fame. Right now our primary focus is helping those who need it. The file and the content is deleted off the World Wide Web, and to be honest, nobody saved it. Why? Because all you had to do was go to the given URL and it would spill all the details. People thought it would be up forever.

So since it’s all done and over now, can you say what the specific vulnerability was that allowed it to happen? I can’t get anything out of the district about it.  In basic terms though, so the average victim can get an idea of what network flaws led to this happening.
If you could, put up parts of this interview and tag FoxNews, MSNBC, ClarksvilleOnline, etc, etc. It wasn’t hard at all. The site had some contracting setup with some other sites (that we had access to) . We found a connection and we sure as hell capitalized on it. You know?

No problem. There’s a story to be told.
Definitely. I know it’ll be a good story but the damage is already done. I decided to be mature though and delete the file before it got too out of hand.