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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 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
Is it freedom of speech if you don't let the other guy talk?
You know, for many of us, we simply don't care about this whiny distinction between "hacking and cracking".
It's stupid -- back in the day, you could hack some code, or you could hack into a system, or you could pull off a hack and hang a volkswagon from a bridge or make your calculator to something cool that nobody expect. We understood the difference between these things, and it was all one word.
You whiny kids who think you "own" the language and have to be telling everybody the "right" want to say it are just fooling yourselves. Even in the nerd community you think you represent, for many of us "hack" still means exactly what you claim it doesn't. Hell, 2600 has been around since the 80's, and it's always been hacker -- it's got a shitload more street cred than you kids who think that it's always been differentiated. Anybody under 40 who is saying anything about what is "hack" and what is "crack" is too fucking young to know what they're talking about.
It's all the same fucking thing -- "cracker" is a very recent word, and quite an arbitrary distinction which people tried to apply after the fact to make what they did sound less evil and dissociate itself from malicious break-in type stuff. Get over it.
Now, STFU, and get off my fucking lawn.
Oh please.
100 people can sit in at a lunch counter, shutting down service, and it's considered activism and protest.
100,000 organized people could easily shut down 1,000 restaurants, or bank branches, or other retail storefronts by the same behavior. Again, activism and protest.
100-500,000 people can jam up the phone banks to Congressional offices and we call it a "Virtual March on Washington." And nobody suggests it doesn't qualify as activism and protest.
All of these count as activism. Yet when an unknown number of people voluntarily download an item to their computer to participate in a "virtual march" on the website of a bank, or the RIAA, or Paypal, or Scientology, somehow it's not activism?
The major difference is whether the participants are willing or unwilling. In the case of most botnet-based DDoS attacks, the participants are unwilling; their machines have been hijacked and often they don't even know they are participants. In the case of LOIC, they are all willing. They purposely downloaded and installed the software. They can leave it running or only turn it on at specific times. They can easily uninstall it if they believe it is being used in a way they don't support.
What is going on is not a "cyber attack." It is a virtual protest march.
You forget, this is the United Corporations of America! We'll tie you down with a Bass Pro Fishing Shop-branded rope and give you 30 lashes with a Wal-Mart branded whip. After it's all done, we'll just put some Neosporin on there, prop you up on an Ikea couch, and let you indulge in that wonderful cultural pasttime known as "watching television", where you will be informed of other great products and services!
Living With a Nerd
They weren't preventing anyone from talking, they were however doing what they could to disrupt business.
You know, under normal circumstances I'd be very against what those acting under the "Anonymous" label have done, just as many on Slashdot are right now. But these are not normal circumstances. We have a government - correction, we have an establishment, because this is an unholy alliance of government, big business, and big media, all of whom are covering up and even assisting with each other's crimes, that's gone rogue. And not just mildly rogue, it's an establishment that's fraudulently launched wars, kidnapped, tortured, raped, and destroyed. There are literally tens of millions of direct victims of this government, and hundreds of thousands of people victimized to the point of being tortured, raped, kidnapped, or killed.
Two years ago this country reacted to what little was getting out by electing someone who had claimed to be against this (and made it a big part of what he supposedly stood for) since he first hit the national spotlight in 2004. And his actions on taking office? To continue virtually every aspect of what made the previous administration so evil, in some cases going further.
Meanwhile, when there's even a hint that some of the truth will come out, the establishment has lead Denial of Service attacks of their own, with the major credit card companies abusing their monopoly to make it harder for such acts to be funded, and Amazon.com going as far not merely to disconnect Wikileaks, but to spread smears against them, smears they're continuing to spread today.
So I'm ambivalent about the hacker attacks. Frankly, I think most of the "victims" deserve it - in fact, they deserve much worse. In a decent world, we'd see:
Be very clear about this: these organizations are doing what they're doing for no other purpose than to assist a rogue establishment in preventing the people from knowing the about the crimes it has committed. They're helping in a campaign to prevent people from knowing that the government, and the media, lied about the wars they started. They're helping in a campaign to prevent people from knowing that, for example, private contractors can rape and kill with impunity, that the government will continue to give them money after they've done so, and that the media will, just by being asked, not report upon it, or if it does, bury it where it will not be seen.
This is what is being hidden. This is what people like Jeff Bezos are more than willing to be a part of.
And I'm supposed to be upset about a bunch of frustrated "hackers" trying to bring down their web servers? Why? They're not engaging in violence, they're not preventing anyone from speaking, and the "right" options - the ones everyone are supposed to use before breaking the law - have been denied in the worst way possible. Democracy was tried. The law isn't even available.
I'm not going to encourage anyone to assist with the DDoS attacks, and not going to engage in them myself. But I simply cannot condemn them. And frankly, if Jeff Bezos or the directors of the major credit cards were in front of me right now, I'd spit on them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Freedom of speech involves freedom from retaliation. If you choose not to do business with them, that's great. But if you prevent others from doing business with them then you've crossed the line." Assuming that we're starting with a level playing field. Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, and Amazon are all able to buy Congressmen. Regular people can't. Our government is so corrupt at this point, there's really no recourse for regular people who have to go up against these corporations with more rights and privileges than actual people.
I don't respond to AC's.
When people lose faith in democracy, they turn to violence. Right now a lot of people, espicially online, feel that they live in a society where corporations rule and people are regarded as nothing more than the consumers and employees that fuel them. Unless people can feel that they matter - that the government really will seriously listen to them - this is just going to continue.