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FBI Raids Texas ISP For Anonymous DDoS Info
jcombel writes with this link to The Smoking Gun, which says "As part of an international criminal probe into computer attacks launched this month against perceived corporate enemies of WikiLeaks, the FBI has raided a Texas business and seized a computer server that investigators believe was used to launch a massive electronic attack on PayPal."
Computerworld has a story, as well.
What could possibly go wrong?
It was a bloody IRC server that's all. It was used by LOIC to get targets, etc...
I'm sure they were scraping and recording all of the chat logs from each IRC channel that was used, and THOSE logs are the ones with the money info, like who was participating, or at least their IP at the time. Snatching the IRC servers themselves is relatively useless.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
You have to get a license to legally make a street protest which shuts down traffic, in most places.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I get the feeling we're about to see Weather Underground 2.0. FBI and friends rounding up subversives, cooking up various stories/evidence/results and both sides getting more and more serious until things go bad.
Anonymous will, I suggest, become the 21st century hippies once more and more tangential interests come aboard, and before you know it a few radical offshoot groups will take on the government in a serious way. Cyberthreats the like of government talk are bullshit, but people with technical knowhow and a bit of time can scuttle bureacracy gone bad, ala various leakings. I don't properly (beyond some scrapings of the history) know the who or what of 1969 onward and how right each side of the government-hippy fence was.. but I'm around for this fight, I'm a witnessing some disturbing trends that displease me greatly and can't say I side with the government being right.
In the cosmic irony department, the captcha for this post is "unfair".
Interesting... So would we need to apply for a license in the country the server is located, and/or in each participating country?
- These characters were randomly selected.
use the fbi to do your dirty work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... the server did not actually send those TCP requests, but was hosting an IRC server. The flooding software allows the user to turn his computer in a voluntary "botnet member". The software then connects to a specific IRC server (can be changed easily in case the server goes out of commission), connects to a specific channel and then a bot in this channel responds to commands by the software and passes the IP address of the target.
This allows the masterminds behind the attacks to coordinate the computers effectively and paralyze sites with an instant flood of requests, instead of having each user configuring the software with a new target I.P. and having the load on the target increase gradually, making it easier to react.
And each country that the traffic crosses over/under/through? That could be long list if you're geographically distributed. Actually maybe a network pro can tell me - could it be almost every country if it's very high traffic and load balancing starts routing things different directions to get to the end destination? I'm out of my field there.
Only where the server is located.
After all, protesters arriving from other countries to a protest don't need separate licenses.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There's nothing that says PayPal couldn't have joined in with Anonymous and DDoS themselves... all it would take is a network admin to join the attack and watch the packets. All of a sudden, he becomes and "investigator"- making it sound like PayPal has their own black ops team, working hand-in-hand with the FBI. Of course, the FBI could do the same, or be wiretapping the data center without a warrant, and claim it was PayPal that gathered the info.
If only they could DDoS Walmart stores.....
Or China
So I'm assuming that we are going to see a probe by authorities into the "patriots" behind the wikileaks DDOS attacks next?
Union strike and protest can also damage the economy. Let put all these peoples behind bars. Who the fuck they think they are? Damaging sort term profit of the all powerful corporations!
WH says DDOS is not a crime
I don't see that in either you quote or in the article.
People who have plead guilty to DDOS attacks have done so under this law:
Specifically 18 U.S.C. 1030 (a) (5) (A) (i), (B) (i).
I would be curious to see this challenged in the case of a single person with a single machine. The efforts of a single individual is not enough to take down a server. In fact, odds are they don't have proof that any of the packets the individual sent even reached the server in question or had any effect on it.
First mistake: They list the IP in the affadavit OUTSIDE of the logs twice as 72.9.153.42 instead of 72.9.153.142 as it should be. One could assume that they could have now raided the wrong server in Tailor Made's farm.
Second mistake: "root" is just an IRC nickname on AnonOPs, and this person does NOT have root access on the IRC server that was raid as falsely assumed in the affadavit. They have oper with override privileges, and that was what was logged. The raid on the server at Tailor Made Servers was made under false pretenses.
Third mistake: Those logs show... [Thu Dec 9 11:14:27 2010] - OVERRIDE: root(root@72.9.153.142) TOPIC #loic '!lazor default targethost=api.paypal.comsubsite=/ speed=3 threads=15 method=tcp wait=false random=true checked=false message=Good_night_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs port=443 stop' ... if anyone here has looked at LOIC's topic parsing, there's two mistakes the FBI made there. The first is that there's no space between targethost=api.paypal.com and subsite=/. The second is that this person "root" is STOPPING the attacks by adding "stop" at the end of the topic. Unless they can show logs of this "root" person throwing "start" in the topic instead of stop, this person is doing exactly the opposite of "willingly and knowingly" executing commands to start a DDoS attack.
This is where the metaphor breaks down. The protesters arriving from other countries can only get there so fast and generally only by engaging in economic activity. If you engage in mass mobile protest any way other than on foot you're only patronizing the problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Doh-ho-ho-ho, you almost had me there.
Apart from creating counter-measure and technical help jobs, when used on the large companys it forces people to use other services, spreading the wealth and creating even MORE jobs.
Quick, amend the broken window fallacy! Throwing bricks through the windows of more efficient businesses create may create jobs, but does it actually generate more overall wealth?
Isn't it amazing that the FBI can get their arses into gear over Anonymous, while allowing thousands of other criminal operations to use US based servers without disturbance. I am constantly horrified by the number of malicious sites operating out of the mainland US that are clearly operating in plain sight.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Anonymous guys should google an implementation of slowloris-over-Tor "XerXeS" like Th3j35t3r uses... (Yeah implementations are out there, do you think th3j35t3r wrote his tool by himself??? LOL)
Going over Tor hides the IP and doing this attack via multiple machines would make them a really nasty bunch of fuckers.
On the other hand maybe they should not do that. You see, one can easily prevent the "XerXeS" tool by just tarpitting multiple connections from a single IP. Or, better yet, tarpit all Tor exit node IPs. Then to hide oneself, the attacker would need multiple machines, essentially a botnet.
As for the former alternative. If you don't have TARPIT support, run: module-assistant auto-install xtables-addons-source
Then run: iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --syn --dport 80 -m connlimit --connlimit-above 5 -j TARPIT
Latter option left as an exercise for the reader. Tweaking connlimit-above left as an exercise to the reader :)
Squelching legitimate political demonstration can damage the economy and cost people jobs. If you care about the economy, preserve our freedom. These FBI agents belong behind bars.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Union strike and protest can also damage the economy. Let put all these peoples behind bars. Who the fuck they think they are? Damaging sort term profit of the all powerful corporations!
Sort term?
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
If you have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, you are not free
Lucky for you, then, that you don't have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, right? On the other hand, it seems like a good idea to make arrangements with the people who are tasked with keeping the streets working and safe when you are setting out to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use the streets they pay for. Or are you implying that the only way to speak out against the government is to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use public property?
Any government that implements such a policy is nothing more than a bunch of thugs and deserves as much respect.
You've got it backwards. Any protester who thinks he has to forcibly prevent other people from using the street because otherwise he doesn't think he can express himself is a thug who should be treated as such.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No your actually right. Thats why networks are supposed to have redundancy and distributed network connections. If one fails a backup is in place to re-route traffic to its end point destination.
The problem that is clear in this case is that there is in no way shape or form in creating a "DDoS protest" license for any particular situation because of the mass complexity of the internet. I've in some cases tested connection routes for businesses and discovered that in some cases packets go through routes out of state then back into state, then BACK out of state before reaching its destination. Its really messed up how routing happens. Thats why we have network protocols that are designed to handle this type of scenario.
Its funny how DDoS has come about over the past 10 years. I almost feel like it was yesterday when I first heard of DDoS attacks, and yet today our network infrastructure hasn't improved to deal with these DDoS attacks any better than they were handled 10 years ago. One company I contracted for, our only solution was to just unplug the server until all the attack stopped. Of course employees still couldn't use the internet because the attacks were still running, but at least the server wasn't melting.
I think that is one of the reasons why Load Balancing came about, so that Slashdot/Digg/4Chan/Reddit bombardments could be handled better. LoL
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
Secondly, someone exercising freedom of Assembly is not always a protester, but of course, this would involve seeing someone else's point of view.
The fact that you are blocking a public street without making any prior arrangements to do so isn't a "point of view" thing - it's a simple are you, or aren't you doing it sort of thing.
As for linking to a Polish document about freedom of assembly? Who has said anything about interfering with freedom of assembly? The US has done more to protect and promote freedom of assembly than any other state in the history of humanity. That has nothing whatsoever to do with physically preventing fellow citizens from using the streets that serve their homes, businesses, and public services/venues.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
While a court-martial is taking place in America about those US Army thrill killers of innocents, an Australian Special Forces unit is undergoing a court-martial in Sydney -- having killed innocents, instead of the Taliban, due to "faulty intel" -- a commonly occurring event.
Polish soldiers in Afghanistan get hit with an IED, so they attack the nearest village, on the assumption the innocents there are the guilty party.
Meanwhile, we've noted that the USAF has obliterated how many Afghanistani wedding parties now (each one consisting of 70 to 90 plus people)?
War Criminal Obama, as with War Criminal Bush, hasn't pursued any of these war crimes and atrocities (excepting the one obvious one now involved in a court-martial at Ft. Lewis, Washington, USA.
Likewise, we observe the outrageious and humongous efforts (if only such efforts were ever expended to hunt down this Osama bin Laden fellow??????) to extradite Julian Assange of Wikileaks back to Gothenburg, Sweden, which just happens to be the location of Jeppesen Systems AB, a subsidiary of Boeing, and affiliated with Jeppesen Dataplan, better known as Boeing's Extreme Rendition Airlines --- how very convenient.
Also pertinent to this blog post, is that Narus, those pesky Narus boxes having been installed at switching centers and IXPs throughout North America as part of that "warrantless wiretapping"/T.I.A. criminal eavesdropping activities, is also owned by Boeing.
It might not generate more wealth, but perhaps it acts to redistribute it?
It's not exactly a fallacy. (Actually, the original might be if I remembered it more fully, but this version isn't...exactly.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Atrocity Atrocity Atrocity Atrocity
Atrocity Atrocity Atrocity Atrocity
Come on!!! Who's With Me?
It's not just a meme, it's the description of how media control works.
Helpful Link to Tune for Singalong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
Unfortunately I have no mix skillz.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
White House cyber-security coordinator Howard Schmidt:
"We've seen over time street protests in cities that shut down traffic, and this is not dissimilar in the online world. There may be a disruption for a short period of time, but the bottom line is we continue to work to make sure that the impact is minimal."
People get arrested, tried, and convicted of criminal offenses committed as part of street protests. That statement means nothing like "DDOS is not a crime" but rather something more like "We will handle these protestors as harshly as we've handled G20 protestors since Seattle."
My goodness astroturf is high!
I love this do whatever you want as long as I don't have to barely take notice of it attitude that is the source of American freedom and democracy, keep it up, you are doing great, your country is more and more free every year so you are *obviously* doing something good!
But... the future refused to change.
Astroturf, really? How does my comment in any way take a side? It applies to everyone, regardless of their political/idealogical leanings. Everyone who goes to the trouble to organize an event large enough to require some consideration about the use of public streets, and who goes to the trouble and expense of working with public safety officials (who have to route traffic around that location, provide sanitation facitilities, and everything else) deserves the opportunity to hold their event. This applies to everyone.
You, on the other hand, appear to favor mob rule, and think that free speech is owned by whoever can shout the loudest or perhaps burn a car in the path of someone else's demonstration. Yeah, you love freedom, I can tell. I'm sure you also think that having your fellow demonstrators smash store windows somehow makes you look more mature and thoughtful, too, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.