Showing posts with label Anonymous hacktivists say Wikileaks war to continue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anonymous hacktivists say Wikileaks war to continue. Show all posts

Friday, December 10, 2010

Anonymous Shifts On WikiLeaks Strategy, Announces It With A Press Release

undefinedThe Internet vigilante group Anonymous has been thrust into the spotlight this week as the WikiLeaks story continues to erupt like a media volcano. So like any group at center of a story would do, Anonymous has put out (yes) a press release outlining the motivations behind the attacks on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa and implying a change in strategy after attacks on Amazon never materialized.
“We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our current goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks’ ability to function.”

Thus far Operation Payback has orchestrated DDoS attacks on the corporate sites of companies deemed enemies of WikiLeaks after it started releasing thousands of diplomatic cables over Thanksgiving weekend.
The Anonymous hacktivist group behind Operation Payback had its main Twitter account and Facebook pages taken away on Wednesday and has since the been decentralized in its social media efforts. This however didn’t stop one of the splinter accounts from tweeting out the below release, stating that the group essentially did not want to injure the companies targeted, but in fact wanted to “raise awareness.”
“While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in aDDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertised in the media,  we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.
The continuing attacks on PayPal are already tested and preferable: while not damaging their ability to process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people tonotice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.”
While the logic here is inconsistent (don’t people also use Paypal and Mastercard to buy presents for their loved ones?) the release hints at a kinder gentler Anonymous afraid of (yes) bad press. If so that would explain this further evidence of a more positive pivot, a mission statement asking group members to cull the most interesting parts of the WikiLeaks cables and republish — An action which, granted, does spread more awareness than the firing of a LOIC cannon.

Source: Tech Crunch

ANON OPS: A Press Release

Who is Anonymous?
In their most recent public statement, WikiLeaks is the only group of people to identify Anonymous
correctly. Anonymous is not a group, but rather an Internet gathering.
Both Anonymous and the media that is covering it are aware of the percieved dissent between
individuals in the gathering. This does not, however, mean that the command structure of
Anonymous is failing for a simple reason: Anonymous has a very loose and decentralized command
structure that operates on ideas rather than directives.
We do not believe that a similar movement exists in the world today and as such we have to learn
by trial and error. We are now in the process of better communicating some core values to the
individual atoms that comprise Anonymous - we also want to take this opportunity to communicate
a message to the media, so that the average Internet Citizen can get to know who we are and what
we represent.
Anonymous is not a group of hackers. We are average Interent Citizens ourselves and our
motivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness
every day.
We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to
attack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our current
goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above
companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function.

What is Operation: Payback
As stated above, the point of Operation: Payback was never to target critical infrastructure of any of
the companies or organizations affected. Rather than doing that, we focused on their corporate
websites, which is to say, their online "public face". It is a symbolic action - as blogger and
academic Evgeny Morozov put it, a legitimate expression of dissent.
The background to the attacks on PayPal and the calls to attack Amazon.com
Amazon, which was until recently WikiLeaks' DNS provider, was one of the first companies to drop
support for WikiLeaks. On December 9th, BusinessInsider.com reported that Amazon.co.uk were
hosting the recently leaked diplomatic cables in e-book form. (Amazon.co.uk has since ceased
selling the bundle of the diplomatic cables.)
After this piece of news circulated, parts of Anonymous on Twitter asked for Amazon.com to be
targetted. The attack never occured.

While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in a
DDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertised
in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make
them feel threatened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are
buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.
The continuing attacks on PayPal are already tested and preferable: while not damaging their ability
to process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people to
notice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.

For The Original Copy, Download This PDF File

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Anonymous recruits Wikileaks 'data army'

The tool through which attacks are carried out against websites perceived to be anti-Wikileaks has now been downloaded more than 31,000 times.
Security experts warned people to avoid joining the voluntary botnet.
Targets of the loose-knit group Anonymous have so far included Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
Amazon is expected to be among firms targeted next using the Anonymous attack tool known as LOIC. When a person installs the tool on their PC it enrols the machine into a voluntary botnet which then bombards target sites with data.
Motivation Anonymous member Coldblood told the BBC that he did not understand how firms such as Visa and Mastercard have decided that Wikileaks is illegal.
"We feel that they have bowed to government pressure. They say Wikileaks broke their terms and conditions but they accept payments from groups such as the Klu Klux Klan," he told the BBC.
He said that he has not personally taken part in the recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks but explained the motives of those who have.
"Everyone is aware that they are illegal but they feel that it is a worthy cause and the possible outcome outweighs the risk," he said.
He said such attacks were only one tactic in its fight to keep the information being distributed by Wikileaks available.

In a twist to the story it has emerged that Amazon, which last week refused to host Wikileaks, is selling a Kindle version of the documents Wikileaks has leaked.
Anonymous have named the online retailer as its next target.
Earlier attacks against Visa and Mastercard knocked the official websites of the two offline for a while and resulted in problems for some credit card holders.
The attacks have been relatively small so far mustering less then 10 gigabits per second of traffic, said Paul Sop, chief technology officer at Prolexic which helps firms to defend themselves against the type of attack being employed by Anonymous.
"What's really wreaking havoc with these enterprises is how often the attackers can rotate the attack vectors," he said. "We see the attack complexity being more devastating as the mitigation technologies enterprises use can't filter out all these permutations."
Defending against an attack typically involves analysis to work out which ones are being employed. A tactic that may not work well in this case, he said.
"These Anonymous attacks are like riding a bull, they can change wildly and at a moment's notice," said Mr Sop.
Carole Thierault, a security researcher at Sophos, warned against getting involved with the Anonymous campaign.
"No-one, no matter how much you want to take part, should do this," she said. "It is very risky, and most probably illegal."
Ms Thierault said downloading and installing the LOIC attack tool was very risky.
"No-one should download unknown code on to their system," she said. "You're giving access to your computer to a complete stranger."

 Coinciding ideals


As well as releasing the attack tool, the Anonymous group has also been active in helping to create mirror sites. To date there are over one thousand sites offering exact copies of the content on Wikileaks.
It is also ensuring the information is available on dark nets, heavily encrypted layers of the internet via which information can be extracted while remaining untraceable.
The DDoS attacks are the latest battle in a wider fight known as Operation Payback, which targets firms Anonymous sees as "misusing the internet".
Past targets include the music industry and law firms associated with the attempt to bring music pirates to book.
The new-found attention on Anonymous has led the group to publish its manifesto.
In it, it denies that it is a group of hackers.
"Anonymous is not an organisation...and it most certainly is not a group of hackers," it said.
"Anonymous is an online living consciousness, comprised of different individuals with, at times, coinciding ideals and goals."
It also keen to distance itself from Coldblood, who it said is not a spokesperson for the group.

Source: BBC

Hackers Attack Those Seen as WikiLeaks Enemies

In a campaign that had some declaring the start of a “cyberwar,” hundreds of Internet activists mounted retaliatory attacks on Wednesday on the Web sites of multinational companies and other organizations they deemed hostile to the WikiLeaks antisecrecy organization and its jailed founder, Julian Assange.

Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision on Tuesday to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies,” as defined by the organization’s impassioned supporters around the world, caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.
Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct are the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.
The Internet assaults underlined the growing reach of self-described “cyberanarchists,” antigovernment and anticorporate activists who have made an icon of Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian.
The speed and range of the attacks also appeared to show the resilience of the backing among computer activists for Mr. Assange, who has appeared increasingly isolated in recent months amid the furor stoked by WikiLeaks’s Web site posting of hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Assange has come under renewed attack in the past two weeks for posting the first tranche of a trove of 250,000 secret State Department cables that have exposed American diplomats’ frank assessments of relations with many countries, forcing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to express regret to world leaders and raising fears that they and other sources would become more reticent.
The New York Times and four other news organizations last week began publishing articles based on the archive of cables made available to them.
In recent months, some of Mr. Assange’s closest associates in WikiLeaks abandoned him, calling him autocratic and capricious and accusing him of reneging on WikiLeaks’s original pledge of impartiality to launch a concerted attack on the United States. He has been simultaneously fighting a remote battle with the Swedish prosecutors, who have sought his extradition for questioning on accusations of “rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion” made by the Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the cases.
American officials have repeatedly said that they are reviewing possible criminal charges against Mr. Assange, a step that could lead to a bid to extradite him to the United States and confront him with having to fight for his freedom on two fronts.
The cyberattacks in Mr. Assange’s defense appear to have been coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who have singled out other groups before, including the Church of Scientology. Last weekend, members of Anonymous vowed in two online manifestos to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks.
Anonymous claimed responsibility for the MasterCard attack in Web messages and, according to one activist associated with the group, conducted waves of attacks on other companies during the day. The group said the actions were part of an effort called Operation Payback, which began as a way of punishing companies that attempted to stop Internet file-sharing and movie downloads.
The activist, Gregg Housh, who disavows a personal role in any illegal online activity, said that 1,500 supporters had been in online forums and chat rooms organizing the mass “denial of service” attacks. His account was confirmed by Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., firm that tracks malicious activity on computer networks.
Most of the corporations whose sites were targeted did not explain why they severed ties with WikiLeaks. But PayPal issued statements saying its decision was based on “a violation” of its policy on promoting illegal activities.
Almost all the corporate Web sites that were attacked appeared to be operating normally later on Wednesday, suggesting that any economic impact was limited. But the sense of an Internet war was reinforced when Netcraft, a British Internet monitoring firm, reported that the Web site being used by the hackers to distribute denial-of-service software had been suspended by a Dutch hosting firm, Leaseweb.
A sense of the belligerent mood among activists was given when one contributor to a forum the group uses, WhyWeProtest.net, wrote of the attacks: “The war is on. And everyone ought to spend some time thinking about it, discussing it with others, preparing yourselves so you know how to act if something compels you to make a decision. Be very careful not to err on the side of inaction.”
Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”
A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous. The women have said that consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange became nonconsensual when condoms were no longer in use.
The cyberattacks on corporations Wednesday were seen by many supporters as a counterstrike against the United States. Mr. Assange’s online supporters have widely condemned the Obama administration as the unseen hand coordinating efforts to choke off WikiLeaks by denying it financing and suppressing its network of computer servers.
Mr. Housh described Mr. Assange in an interview as “a political prisoner,” a common view among WikiLeaks supporters who have joined Mr. Assange in condemning the sexual abuse accusations as part of an American-inspired “smear campaign.”
Another activist used the analogy of the civil rights struggle for the cyberattacks.
“Are they disrupting business?” a contributor using the name Moryath wrote in a comment on the slashdot.org technology Web site. “Perhaps, but no worse than the lunch counter sit-ins did.”

Anonymous hacktivists say Wikileaks war to continue

Speaking on the BBC's Today programme, Coldblood said that "more and more people are downloading the voluntary botnet tool".
This signs them up to a so-called botnet, an army of machines that can then launch attacks.
Overnight Visa became the latest victim.
Its website experienced problems while Mastercard payments were also disrupted.
Both were victims of so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks, which bombard websites with requests until they are unable to cope, and fall over.
The Operation Payback campaign is targetting firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.
Wikileaks attracted the ire of the US government when it began publishing 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables. The government has written to Wikileaks, saying its actions are illegal but denies putting pressure on firms such as PayPal to withdraw services.
Coldblood, who is not an official spokesperson for Anonymous, told the BBC that "thousands" of people had joined up in what he described as a "war of data".
"We are trying to keep the internet open and free but, in recent years, governments have been trying to limit the freedom we have on the internet," he said.
Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.
Visa's website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.
But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.
Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivists" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.
Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that said its customers had "a complete loss of service".
In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard's SecureCode, had been disrupted.
Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.
Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode system, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.
"While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally."
False account Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.
It said that it has hit several targets, including the website of the prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

An Anonymous member told AFP news agency the group would extend their campaign to anyone with "an anti-Wikileaks agenda".
PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.
The firm said Wikileaks' account had violated its terms of services.
"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] activities were deemed illegal in the United States," PayPal's Osama Bedier told the Le Web conference in France.
"And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending their account.
"It's honestly, just pretty straightforward from our perspective and there's not much more to it than that," he said.
Other firms that have distanced themselves from the site have also been hit in the recent spate of attacks including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The bank said Mr Assange had provided false information when opening his account.
Swamp site Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.
Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at Imperva said the attacks were "very focused".


"It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.
Before the Mastercard attack, Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" were being done to target companies that had stopped working with Wikileaks or which were perceived to have attacked the site.
"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he said.
"As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means."
"We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government," he said.
Some of the early DDoS hits failed to take sites offline, although that was not the point of the attacks, according to Coldblood.
"The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website."
DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.
Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may hurt people trying to get to these sites" but said it was "the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displeased".
Anonymous is also helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for Wikileaks, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.
Coldblood told the BBC that the group was beginning to wind down the DDoS attacks so that it could concentrate on using "other methods which are more focused on supporting Wikileaks and making sure the Internet stays a free and open place".

Source: BBC