Agorism
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WikiLeaks vigilante war spills onto Web
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/12/th...r-internet-and-web-sites-like-mastercard.html
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/12/th...r-internet-and-web-sites-like-mastercard.html
The hackers who say they are sticking up for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange continued to flex their digital muscles on Thursday, extending outages at Mastercard.com and Visa.com to a second day. And even as the group claiming responsibility for the attacks openly discussed big new targets like Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook, Twitter took unsuccessful steps to disperse the virtual mob.
Meanwhile, published reports say a 16-year-old was arrested by Dutch authorities on Thursday in connection with the attacks. The youth was arrested in The Hague; authorities did not release his name, or say how promient a figure the suspect was in the attacks.
A loose-knit group of hackers who gather on the website 4Chan.org under the name Anonymous spent most of the past 24 hours playing cat-and-mouse with Twitter, where the group announces its attack plans. On Wednesday night, Twitter suspended its main account -- Anon_Operation -- soon after an attack on Visa.com was announced there. At the time, the account had amassed 22,000 followers.
There were immediate calls for an attack on Twitter that either didn't materialize or wasn't strong enough to impact the site's performance. Meanwhile, the group managed to quickly regroup using slight variations on its Twitter account name, such as Anon_Operationn.
A Facebook page devoted to the attacks, called "Operation Payback," also was suspended Wednesday night.
Members refer to the cyberattacks as "Operation Payback," or "Operation Avenge Assange." On Thursday morning, many had decided their next target should be Amazon.com, which last week decided to stop hosting Wikileaks-related material.
"Sharpen your arrows, get ready to fire at Amazon 30min til impact," wrote one alleged ringleader on Twitter at 10:30 ET.
It was unclear whether the group had any immediate impact on Amazon's website, which appeared to be generally available throughout the morning.
The threats were just the latest episode in a vigilante cyberskirmish surrounding Wikileaks that spilled over onto the wider Internet on Wednesday, creating big headaches for household name brands MasterCard and Visa.
The online conflict began recently when a hacker named The Jester claimed to have temporarily taken down the WikiLeaks website.
Copycats then began hitting WikiLeaks and its mirror websites. Soon after, other hackers began a pro-Wikileaks campaign, attacking government agencies and corporations that appear to oppose Wikileaks.
The attacks have generated a lot of noise online -- and a lot of media coverage -- but so far, neither side has scored many political points or landed a serious digital body blow. In fact, the hacker battle might best be compared to a bar fight that's spilled out onto main street and bloodied a few bystanders.
The first high-profile victim in the skirmish was Mastercard.com, which was still reeling from the effects of the attack on Thursday. The Anonymous group also claims to have attacked PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance and a Swedish government website -- all in the name of sticking up for WikiLeaks.
"They are not just making noise. Everyday consumers, everyday people are getting caught up in this now," said Dean Turner, a computer security researcher at Symantec Corp.
On all sides, the attacks have been mostly a nuisance. Both Mastercard.com and Visa.com are more like virtual brochures, notwishstanding headlines that say, "MasterCard is down." Knocking those Web sites offline didn't interfere with the standard processing of credit card payments, for example. The PayPal attack was relatively harmless, also -- the firm's blog was disabled, but payments were not disrupted. Anonymous did cause real headaches for PostFinance, however, as the bank’s online banking site was disabled for the better part of a day.
The attacks shouldn't be confused with a political movement, however. Groups like Anonymous and 4Chan are amorphous. Even among 4Chan users there's disagreement over what side to take on the conflict.
Nor do the attacks represent the first time a political argument spilled out onto the Internet and led to denial of service attacks that disabled Web sites. Politically motivated attacks reach back at least as far as 2001, when a U.S. Navy plane landed on Hainan Island in China. A Chinese hacking group named "Honker Union" attacked U.S. websites in the days that followed. There have been at least a dozen high-profile political denial of service attacks since then, the most famous being attacks that crippled Estonian government and corporate websites after a dispute involving the moving of a Russian statue there. For a comprehensive list of such attacks, follow this link.
The WikiLeaks attacks are not the first time that the Anonymous group has taken on a cause. It has attacked the Motion Pictures Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, for example, when both those groups took action against Internet music and movie piracy. It also attacked the Church of Scientology.
It would be a mistake to see the group as an organized force, however. The attacks are being conducted with a simple tool the group calls "LOIC." It allows a volunteer to simply enter the name of a website to join an attack. The volunteer’s Internet connection is then routed through a "command and control" server, which amplifies the number of requests being sent to the target website from that volunteer's computer, eventually overwhelming the Web server.
"Really, it's very simple. Anyone can do it," Turner said.
Turner estimated that it took about 5,000 volunteers to topple Mastercard.com.
Organizers in the Anonymous group simply publish the name of their next target, and invite volunteers to join the attack.
Websites overcome denial of service attacks by filtering out attacking traffic -- usually by recognizing the IP addresses of computers that initiate the attack and dropping, or "black holing," the requests. But attacks initiated through distributed denial of service tools like LOIC can be hard to deal with because the volunteer computer requests blend in with normal Web traffic. The target website then must either go off-line until the attack subsides or implement much finer filtering tools, which can be expensive and slow down the flow of normal Web requests.
Even then, clever attackers can route requests through proxy servers and rotate them, making it even hard to separate good traffic from bad.
"There really isn't necessarily a good way to filter out what appear to be good requests," Turner said, "That's why (these attacks) are still such a problem."
While the recent attacks have yet to cause much damage, Turner said, they are no laughing matter.
"This kind of thing can get out of hand, and that's the problem," he said. "The downtime costs companies real money. And there are people (In Switzerland) who couldn't pay their bills."
One interesting element in the WikiLeaks cyberskirmish: Wikileaks leader Julian Assange himself has a background in computer hacking. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to relatively minor hacking-related charges in Australia and paid a fine. Later, he wrote a tool that scans the Internet for vulnerable computers, and even helped write a book titled “Underground: Tales of Hacking.”
Security researcher Jeff Bardin, an expert in international cyberattacks, said he's not surprised the hackers have risen up in support of Assange, given his past.
"I bet Assange's hacking past is leveraging his ties to the hacking community," said Bardin, the chief security strategist at XA Systems. WikiLeaks hacker supports could merely feel a kinship with him, or there could be an even stronger connection, he speculated.
"I bet this was premeditated by Assange," Bardin said.
