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Operation Payback and Hactivism 101
Orome1 writes "While individual acts of hacktivism are inconvenient, something else happens when hacktivists group together — they commonly perform a DDoS attack. Techniques have advanced to automate the process, making the attacks more powerful and thus more able to bypass security controls — the effect, however, remains the same. Let us take a look at the recent Operation Payback which has gained notoriety in the past few months."
It's not activism. It's a bunch of spoiled brats acting like thugs.
Stop calling it HACKtivism?
Amongst nerds (which is pretty much whoever is following it on this site) - to 'hack' does not meant the same as 'to crack'.
And calling DDOSing 'hacking' is wrong on both definitions of hack. Especially if the client is just a script kiddie using a program which s/he doesn't know (or care enough) to work out what its doing exactly.
slashvertisement much? terrible article that doesn't say anything about Operation Payback, just a wikipedia-esque definition of hacktivism.
The DDOS Wikipedia Entry is much more informative than this article, I would suggest reading it instead.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing. It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Whomever coined the word "Hactivism" has a DDoS with their name on it, as far as I'm concerned. Hate, hate, hate, that word. It's neither hacking nor activism.
DDos attack = slashdot Effect.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
As advocates of Democracy and transparency, let's break the law and act in secret to take down big companies, which in turn hurts small businesses who use these payment services. Let's also inconvenience random shoppers. Let's create all kinds of random collateral damage to make a point about supporting transparency by supporting a completely secretive organization.
Sorry, I'm not buying it.
I was just at the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial and museum. One of the more interesting aspects of it was that the people motivated to bomb the federal building (and kill infants in the nursery) were upset at the government. They felt the most effective way to change the government was a terrorist attack. The two responsible were caught. One will serve life in prison while the other was executed. They didn't change government, but they did forfeit their lives.
Conversely, families of vicitms banded together, formed a group and went to Washington D.C. to ask for reform in how the death penalty is handled in federal cases. They felt the best way to support Democracy and affect change was to use Democracy itself.
That is such a novel concept.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
People of the Interwebs, this wave of newfaggotry will be crushed under our merciless heels. I GUARANTEE IT.
I find it interesting that some people on Slashdot consider them "freedom fighters" of a sort, trying to preserve freedom of speech, when some of the same group have actively tried to interfere with Tumblr and Facebook merely because they didn't like the kind of people who posted on them.
As someone upthread said, these aren't freedom fighters, they're thugs. Just because their targets at the moment include businesses you don't like, doesn't make them less so.
united hackers association formed........ and guess what however many we are....we still exist and will exist until the lights go out of humanity forever.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Picketing is a public act. DDoS is not. There is an essential difference. The media orchestration that we have seen over the last few days around DDoD lend me to think me that if there are a few teenagers behind these attacks, they are manipulated by those who want to influence public opinion in the direction of a kill-switch as one poster has mentioned above, and in the direction of measures to rein in on the Internet.
It is all too easy for provocateurs to do as they please, as these actions are anonymous. But the media go on reporting on this ascribing these actions to "a movement in support of Wikileaks". We don't know that, they don't know that.
So is Hactivist what we will be saying in 2011, since "douchebag" reached critical mass in 2010, much like the?
But I would observe that while the millstones of Mastercard et al may grind slowly they grind exceedingly fine. As my old Lutheran school teacher used to tell us about other stuff...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Please. Making a DDoS with a simple program relates to Hacking like Kicking garbage cans out of frustration relates to making really good and creative political demonstrations.
Even if i do not consider myself a hacker, i think think that the following rules apply for most hackers:
a) Hacking is creative, finding interesting ways to do and know interesting things, and communicating them.
b) If its used for a purpose, make sure the purpose harms nobody. Always try to be useful.
c) don't make hacks available in a form that stupid idiots can use them without understanding - that is to protect them from harming themself and others.
d) Dont mistake your knowledge for power or superiority to judge over others. That would be the same as the superiority of the robber waiting in the dark alley.
e) asymmetric warfare is often used by terrorists. Make sure you are careful when you can create an ethics based on the assumption that fighting an asymmetric war is justified.
f) DDoS are something which should be prevented. They have been used by Russian hackers to take smaller countries web offline. They have been used by spammers to kick ant-spam and malware websites out of the net. They have been used to kick out political activists. DDoS are a weapon working best against small institutions. A small NGO maybe cant afford 1000Euro of Traffic costs. Amazon redistributes their cloud and thats it.
I don't think the article had any more information than the summary. The article read like a middle school research project. The discussion on the topic is only slightly more interesting...
I'm sure the kids on 4chan/b/ are enjoying the attention...until they find out the "hacking" kit they installed just uploaded all of dad's financial information.
Wikileaks did it to themselves.
Instead to sticking to the leaking criminal activity or human rights violations, leaks decided to just release everything they were given without regard to consequences.
They are now actually aiding countries like China and Saudi Arabia by exposing all the US information and opinions on them.
Good job leaks.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Maybe we should send this to all the media outlets as an explanation for what a DDoS is.
You, Mr. Retail Mogul, happen to own a mail order catalog. You make money by having customers mail you a physical (pen and paper) form that states their order and also includes a check for payment. You get lots of mail every day that contain orders. To make this analogy fit better, we'll say that all orders must be sent as registered mail that requires you to sign off on.
One day some people decide that the haircut you just got is a crime to humanity and must be punished. They get hundreds of thousands of disgusted people together and decide to all write thousands of letters each to your Mail-In Orders Department. The letters they send all look legitimate and come from many different locations across the U.S. and the globe.
The U.S. Postal Service doesn't know which orders are legitimate or not so they deliver all the letters. Your mail room has a normal volume of 800 letters per day. Now all of a sudden it's getting 160,000 letters per day, most of them being fake orders. See the problem? Your mail room staff must open each letter and examine the contents to determine if it is a real order or not. The USPS also can't keep up with delivering the letters. Since all letters are registered, you must sign a form upon receipt and the USPS must return that response to the sender (who may have used a fake return address!). The USPS also has trouble getting all of these delivery receipts back from you to deliver to the local branch. They are only used to 800 per day coming from you.
The problem is that all the requests seem legitimate and as such you must respond to each one individually. It is a distributed denial of service attack because you and 100,000 of your closest friends are bombarding a business with legitimate-looking letters.
"Hacking" (using the butchered media definition) would be more like breaking into the business and burning some of the letters or maybe even the mail room workers. Slipping laxatives in the workers' food or changing their schedules to all be gone during business hours might be good analogies too.
While I have some sympathy for the feelings that have inspired these attacks I think the whole idea (if there is actually such a thing), is flawed. Protecting freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom of the press by making information and services inaccesible is contradictory at best. On the other hand I don't see how the more literal "denial of service" attacks by Amazon, Visa, Paypal, Mastercard against Wikileaks can be defended (if they can be I haven't seen such a defence from any of them anyway).
There must however be more creative and legal ways to mount mass protest against these corporate entities that go beyond just terminating your private use of their services. Some possibilities come to mind: writing tons of emails complaining about their decisions to all company related email adresses you can dig up and mass posting reviews on Amazon criticizing their decision for instance. I'm sure I'm missing lots of interesting ones but you get the point.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
It's sad that the above post has languished at 0 points and not been modded up. If I had the mod points to give, I'd give.
At first paypal was blabbering that they cut wikileaks due to 'violation of tos', and there was no political pressure involved. (probably liebermann warned them to say that). A few days with anonymous, they came around to openly say that they did it due to political pressure. A few more days, they decided to release the wikileaks funds they were holding ...
you cant say it didnt work.
Read radical news here
This looks like another case of "we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't on the internet." The media have consistently characterized Anonymous as "hackers" and "cyber-terrorists" which are way, WAY more malicious than what they actually are, which many people on slashdot have accurately described. If they are anything, they are picketers: the internet equivalent of teenagers with posterboard: yes they are not fostering delicately managed discourse, and yes they are interfering with the operation of "legitimate businesses" but neither are they unjustified or even transgressing against acceptable protest protocol. However, the media paints a fantasy of these hardened e-criminals jacking onto the net stream to funnel pure information directly from the cyber vaults into the unsuspecting infosphere. This is another case of an "the intertron will steal your credit cards!" hysteria, which
Picketing is a public act. DDoS is not. There is an essential difference.
Yes, the difference is that picketing rarely gets one arrested, while DDoSing activates all of the police and military power of the federal government. There's a hell of a lot more to lose by participating in a DDos than picketing.
I don't respond to AC's.
irc://178.63.172.193/OperationPayback
Perhaps it's because if you picket legally you won't get arrested. It's a difficult concept but legal protests are legal as long as they continue to obey the relevant laws. Of course there's more to lose when engaging in an illegal activity. The Anonymous thugs aren't heroes that should be lionized. They can't be bothered with an actual protest because they are too busy smashing windows.
Was this written by a 6th grader? Terrible writing, no research, flawed or lacking arguments. What's the point?
How does one protest Mastercard, exactly?
I don't respond to AC's.
Start a facebook (or whatever is popular) campaign.
Cancel your Mastercard credit cards and tell them why you are doing so.
Don't use services that use Mastercard systems and explain the reason for not using someone's service.
Picketing is a public act. DDoS is not.
That’s incorrect. Your online identity is known. People’s real identities have been found using that information and they’ve been charged with crimes for it.
And even if it wasn’t illegal, as it ought not to be (no more than any real life protest is illegal), that simply shows an inability of the online community to enforce consequences for this sort of action.
For instance, if some of the major players banded together and designed their servers to share IP addresses in real-time during a DDoS, the attackers might suddenly find that Google, Hotmail, etc. refused to acknowledge connections from their IP address, making their internet connection fairly useless until they stopped flooding the DDoS target and their IP expired from the blacklist (which could be set to occur in several hours or even less, as long as they had stopped actively participating in the DDoS).
But that would require actual work on their part to find a solution to address their problem and fix it. It’s much easier for them to just yell about how the DDoS attackers are criminals and bring the hurt on a few of them to discourage the rest a la the RIAA playbook.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Picketing is NOT about denying access to something, it is about persuading people not to go in. Picketing is non-violent, and non-disruptive. The idea is to call attention to a problem, and to hopefully persuade others to not do business with a place. If you are forcibly stopping people from going in, that's a blockade and that isn't legal.
If you think I'm an asshole, you are within your rights to picket my house. You can stand outside, not on the property, with a sign and let people know, including people who come to visit. However, if you try to block me from entering my house, the police will come and remove you and charge you with a crime. You can't prevent me from going where I want.
Now occasionally protesters do blockade a business as a form of protest. Guess what? They get arrested for that, and they KNOW they will. It is a form of civil disobedience and they understand the consequences.
This is not picketing, it is blockading and it is illegal.
Disruptors show how important it is to educate people and teach them critical thinking skills. If today's teenagers blindly follow disruptors without a second thought, it's our own fault for not teaching them to be wiser.
Blaming anonymity is one option, but it won't make people smarter. Better to educate ourselves (as a society) rather than to take away every problem that challenges our intelligence.
Also, I personally don't think the people behind the recent attacks on the music industry or in support of WikiLeaks are being manipulated. They have good arguments, which we may agree or disagree with, but these arguments are not stupid. It's clear the movement or group has put some thought into this. Anonymous/Operation: Payback has explained that they want copyrights to be shorter in duration. Regarding WikiLeaks, they explained that they believe a) too much secrecy kills democracy and b) secrecy has been abused by the government, therefore there is need for WikiLeaks.
I'm not saying those arguments are right, only that they are good (i.e. they are not completely absurd).
If Anonymous were manipulated by someone and just looking for an excuse to do harm, I would expect them to come up with much less constructive arguments, such as "Corporations are evil, period" or "We just think anarchy is good". I would also expect them to do more damage than simply taking down websites for a few days. Compare what they do to other forms of protest that we commonly find acceptable but that are more damaging and you'll realize that they're quite peaceful. They don't hack, they don't destroy property, they don't assault people, they don't encourage others to use violence... Many Nobel Peace Prize winners can't say the same about themselves, if that means anything.
(And I'm willing to bet some smartass is going to say my assessment of Anonymous is probably biased since I don't use a nickname).
It's a difficult concept but legal protests are legal as long as they continue to obey the relevant laws.
And as long as the relevant laws continue to say that the protest is legal. Does the company you’re picketing have lobbyists?
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
that article was sooooo boring... I didnt know we had 10 year olds and grandmas reading slashdot....
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
This presents a problem when you wish to send a message to Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal. Take those three out of the equation and you are very rapidly running out of options to buy anything on most sites.
Many protests involve preventing others from doing business with a company.
Organizational boycotts are one.
Or protests can crowd the streets, make it difficult to enter a place of business, or just make doing business an unpleasant experience with hundreds of people waving placards outside.
I am a freelancer who gets paid entirely through Paypal. These attacks may occasionally make it difficult for me to access my money, the same way a loud crowd outside my bank would inconvenience me.
But that's not crossing any bullshit "line." The site will probably be up again in an hour or two.
Now, if they stole all my money from my account, or somehow got it permanently frozen, THAT would be crossing a line.
of persons. And while they are legally, in the US at least, that doesn't mean they deserve those rights.
A blog about stuff.
You have the right not to be murdered, stolen from, maimed or silenced, but asking to never be inconvenienced is the height of entitlement.
I am a freelancer who gets paid through Paypal and spends money with a Visa debit card. I am inconvenienced by DDoS attacks.
I am also a citizen who understands that sometimes a price must be paid for freedom. I have protested, signed petitions, voted... and nothing has happened. If anything, things have gotten worse. My petitions have been overwritten by paid astroturfers and phony corporate funded PACs. My vote has been overwritten by companies willing to spend billions of dollars of advertising, and to a lesser extent by the two-party democracy system. My protests have been ignored.
I am not alone in this frustration. I am willing to have people take it a step further (I'd take part in the attacks if I had my own computer, but unfortunately I have to share, which would put others at risk). Not to violence or destruction, but ends that do make it more difficult to do business.
If a little personal inconvenience is enough for you to hate a protester, maybe you should examine your own system of morality rather than theirs.
What if 100,000 Scientologists shut down Wikipedia? is that still activism?
Yes, because the question isn't whether the action is "activism" (clearly it is), it is whether that activism is good or bad. That's up to individuals to decide.
My opinion: some of the stuff on Wikileaks should be publicly available and some of it shouldn't (I think the world can live without knowing
I think that there should be enforceable laws against releasing classified information--the internet may not make that practical anymore (remains to be seen). There should be just enough of a legal and practical deterrent that it requires effort and sacrifice in order to release classified info--so that it will only be done when enough people feel strongly that it is a moral imperative (remember, people get arrested at sit-ins and they do it anyway, but only when they really care about the cause).
It is all too easy for provocateurs to do as they please, as these actions are anonymous. But the media go on reporting on this ascribing these actions to "a movement in support of Wikileaks". We don't know that, they don't know that.
Yeah, I'm sure Operation Avenge Assange is completely unrelated to Wikileaks.
Those sit in protests of the sixties crossed the same lines. How wrong we all were :-(
Corporations should not be afforded the rights of persons.
Sorry but that's nonsensical. The enjoyment of the rights of a person is the sine qua non of the corporate form. What you meant to write is "corporations should be outlawed."
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
If you publish the twitter for anonymous on Facebook be ready to loose your account.
Despite the URL being on the 6 PM news in Australia I know of one other person besides myself that has had a Facebook account closed and the only common element is we published the Twitter link.
Fuck me it is New World Order!
Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Red_Cracker