Displaying items by tag: Anonymous

With all that is going on in the “hacker” world there is more drama today as someone is possibly claiming to maybe know who The Jester is. The catch, well it might be The Jester himself. To fill you in on a little background information; The Jester (also known as th3j35t3r) has made something of a name for himself in his activities against WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and other sites that do not agree with his politics. He has styled himself as a vigilante hacker and one that has the “power” to take down sites single handedly (with the right DDoS tools).

Wow, who would have thought that a site like The Pirate Bay would ever be taken down by a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service), but that is exactly what it looks like is happening to the world famous torrent listing site. What makes the situation interesting is thinking about who might be behind the attack and, of course why? So let’s walk through a few likely scenarios and a few that are a little off the deep end.

We have always been a strong supporter of net neutrality and in general keeping the internet open as a communication and cultural tool. There are many, many people and organization that do not support this and still more that only pay it lip service. We have found what we can only call hypocritical in one of the more open countries out there; the Netherlands. At the same time they have passed a law on Net Neutrality, they have also ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.

Today’s copyright, patent and intellectual property laws are something to read. If you have an extra couple of days that you do not mind losing you should read through some of them. They are astonishing in their complexity and how they take are working not to help foster invention, but to make sure that competition is limited. In fact, many Americans might be interested to know that our own National Anthem would be considered in violation of Copyright.

Well we knew it would come to this, despite growing outcry against the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act the House of Representatives (who are they representing?) is holding a debate on this controversial bill. We have talked about CISPA in the past and the bills that led up to what is nothing more than a revocation of your right to private communication in the past and what the implications of a bill so loosely outlined will mean in the coming months.

If there is one thing that you can say Anonymous has done that has a measurable positive effect it is exposing the level of Corporate and Government Ignorance. Ignorance is not an admissible excuse any longer in this day and age and is often used in court when someone says they did not know they were breaking the law. Since this is generally accepted why is anyone willing to give companies that show massive amounts of ignorance (which is just really lack of forethought or cost cutting) when it is discovered that their systems are not secure? We are shocked that this is at all acceptable considering the data breaches going back as far as 2009. Still we continually hear about this product or that network is suddenly discovered to be insecure. Exactly how is that possible?

Looking at bills like SOPA, PIPA and CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) it is easy to see the argument for Civil Liberties, Censorship, Personal Privacy and Private Communications. In fact we hear about this on a daily basis from groups like Anonymous, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and more. However, while all of these arguments are very valid and ring in the ears of voters and consumers everywhere there is another threat that many are overlooking. This threat might even be larger than the ones that are talked about over and over; the security threat.

The online movement known as Anonymous had a fairly busy weekend and even managed to push their “fun” into Monday. According to several of the Anonymous twitter accounts they are now rather upset at PasteBin. It seems that the owner of PasteBin is unhappy about the uses that Anonymous has put his “code sharing” site to. He laments that it was never intended for the sharing of sensitive information and has even stated he is going to hire additional workers to help remove these types of posts. This had an interesting effect on the collective where tweets saying things like “Srsly Pastebin, f*** you - @Pastebin to hire staff to tackle hackers' 'sensitive' posts” .

A while ago we wrote a piece that talked (in simple terms) about how Anonymous could kill the internet through attacking the root DNS servers. The article was written with the intent to give a background on the system in place and how it works. We did not then, nor do we now believe that Anonymous would take down the internet. As with all of the threats to take down twitter, Facebook and other forms of communication it would be exceptionally counterproductive. If Anonymous were to take down the internet and prevent connecting to servers via DNS it would lose many of their followers and supporters for at least the length of the hack.

A new Anonymous splinter group has hit the scene with a name that is sure to bring back bad memories for the authorities. The name as many of you might have heard is LulzSec Reborn. If the name is any indication it means that either some of the old members of LulzSec are back or people that were sympathetic to the LulzSec cause have reincarnated the name for their own purposes. The question is; regardless of who is behind this new group, what are the purposes.