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Tuesday, 21 August 2012 15:05

Anonymous Takes out the UK Ministry of Justice Site, Still No Word on a Response against AntiLeaks

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WikiLeaks was having a bad time of it about a week ago when the group AntiLeaks popped up on the scene seemingly out of nowhere and started hammering them and their mirrors with a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. When the news hit that the site was under attack many jumped to the conclusion that it was a state sponsored attack. At least people did until AntiLeaks claimed responsibility through someone that uses the name Diet Pepsi. This led to a merry round of speculation about the group and who they really were. We covered this news from the angle of the technology involved and came up with a good case for the use or Torrent Blocking technology that has popped up on the scene.

We know that Microsoft invested money in a company called Pirate Pay that was able to poison torrent Swarms with massive amounts of bad data packets in an attempt to kill the swarm. This seemed like a very likely candidate for the technology behind the attack although there is still no hard evidence that this is what is actually being used. Eventually WikiLeaks managed to get out from under the pressure of the 10Gb/s attacks by moving behind a cloud front that prevents the bad data packets from getting to the actual servers. This was a very smart move on their part and one which has so far prevented a repeat of the attacks that took them offline for almost a week. Diet Pepsi has vowed that they will find a way through the cloud proxy and take WikiLeaks down again.

One item that we found interesting at the time of the original attack was a comment by someone claiming to be Anonymous. The comment was simply a tweet that said “Hey @antileaks, do you know who you’re messing with? #Anonymous #WikiLeaks” This was supposedly posted by @_anonops. AntiLeaks responded later saying they were not concerned at all about this. What we find unusual is that despite this tweet we have heard nothing about Anonymous planning any type of Op against AntiLeaks. They have hit the UK Government pretty hard though with their OpAssange. So far they have brought down the Ministry of Justice and The Department for Work and Pensions. Both sites were subjected to a DDoS for a while, but appear to have put policies in place to allow for the site to be available (although they do state that there may be continued interruptions). Meanwhile Sweden has also suffered from attacks with a health and fitness site being offline although we could not tell how the site (primavi.se) was connected to the issue with Assange.  

Anonymous has released a statement claiming they will continue in their support for WikiLeaks and Assange, but again there is no mention of AntiLeaks and we have heard nothing about the group or any response against them from inside Anonymous. We poked around to see if we could find anything out, but if there is anything going on no one is talking about it.

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Read 3305 times Last modified on Tuesday, 21 August 2012 22:04
Sean Kalinich

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