Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Claims Possession of Stuxnet Worm
An anonymous reader writes "Last night, a member of hacker group Anonymous announced on Twitter that the group was in possession of the Stuxnet worm. Recently, Anonymous has been in the news for its high profile attacks on software security firm HBGary, after Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary's sister firm HBGary Federal, claimed to have acquired the names of senior Anonymous members and threatened to release them to the public. This is where the possibility for Anonymous getting its hands on Stuxnet increases."
TFA doesn't say if they have the source code or not.
Iran was in "possession" of the worm too, btw.
If Anonymous was all that, why don't they take out the NSA? Hmmmmmmmm?!?
I double dog dare them!
Yeah, so? I have a copy of the Code Red and Nimda somewhere in my office. Am I dangerous? No. Because they are known viruses and the holes the exploits used have been patched shut now.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Is Anonymous planning to deploy Stuxnet on, um, hacked sites? Stuxnet is really bad for people who tend to collect centrifuges, but it's just another virus when it comes to people with PC's. Doesn't every AV application check for this yet?
I don't know why Slashdot is still tagging this 'wikileaks' when it's clearly no longer about wikileaks at all.
it's been available for ages.
It's a great PR move by Anon in that it's garners a stack of press due to the combinations of:
"shadowy hackers"
"stuxnet"
Well played anon.
What is actually more significant is the upcoming http://anonleaks.ru
The potential for them to claim the popular mindshare that wikileaks has had is very real.
None of the other groups have managed (openleaks, crowdleaks, abcleaks, xyzleaks, 123leaks, etc etc etc).
What a complete waste of an article.
Anonymous found out who produced the stuxnet worm, and the other parties are trying to threaten anonymous to keep silent ...
Read radical news here
Didn't we go through this with Al Quaida not many years ago?
This can't be the same Anonymous (off-shoot of 4chan) that thinks writing an aggressive Windows GUI ping program is "hacking"
Some proper organised crime group has usurped the name, surely.
"Hey, we announce ourselves as Anonymous, then all these script kiddies, who just DOS websites and leave blazingly obvious trails for authorities to follow, get sent down for our criminal deeds"
Anonymous is no longer related to any chans, it has become something on its own full with scriptkids wanting to belong to something bigger. Anonymous can officially be clasified as a terrorist group in my book with threats and attacks all over the world to defend their points of view.
It has totally lost the anarchistic feel it had and has become a group consisting of a handful of 'smart' guys giving out orders to the masses of zombie idiots who give up their connection voluntarily.
I hope everyone realizes that eventhough it recruits on sites like 4chan this version of anonymous is now out of their hands and became a radical splinter cell of the original anonymous.
That's like having possession of the ultimate supervirus, which will KILL ALL HUMANS who have blond hair, brown eyes, a beard, and a vagina.
The thing is so damned specific it's useless.
But are you code red reseller? Anonymous is now an official Stuxnet Gold affiliate
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
In other news: Iran claims posession of the Stuxnet virus as well
Anonymity does not imply a flat hierarchy. It simply means that screen names cannot (in theory) be tied to real ones. For example, Spartacus may be notionally equal to everyone else in Anonymous, but if he/she is well-respected in the group you might well find other members happy to follow his/her lead in coordinated actions.
Similarly, anarchy does not automatically imply disorder, only a lack of rulers. There's nothing to stop people self-organising into whatever organisational structure they desire.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
They could have the source or not, the vulnerabilities that it used to spread could have been patched already (starting with the disabled autorun). Was safe to spread it at the very start because the specific hardware for that payload wasnt very used afaik, and all the techniques that it used to hide itself should now known by security products vendors.
So, it will should be able to damage only the windows users without updates nor running antivirus? Is the target of this announcement people that can't tell if a gun made of soap is real? Or with that (and very little extra effort/knowledge) they could do something close to undetectable that target normal windows systems used in critical environments?
Well, even in the worst case are good news, if there are reasons to be scared then could force to migrate critical environments to safer OSs.
Anyone can get a copy of the Stuxnet worm, just create an account on the right security forums and download a copy.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
That's the most hilarious thing I've read in a while!
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Lets look at the situation properly:
Anonymous is a group composed of [Members N], lead by [Leader L] of [belief X], who attempt to attack [Company Y] over [Reason Z].
Now, we know nothing about L or N. We don't know who took part in DDOSing mastercard (or who lead it), we don't know who hacked into the site (or who lead it), nor do we know their link to whoever DDOSed scientology, google bombed scientology, or protested in the streets. We don't know anything.
So assuming that N and L are variable. X changes with L.
So Anonymous isn't really a group. Its not a 'group of people which are now becoming a terrorist group'. Its an ever-changing grouping of different people by a different leader who chooses their target and their method. Do they have a master plan? Not really.
So viewing how anon changes is rather useless, since pretty much everything changes all the time.
This is the equivalent of looking at the human race at a whole and claiming that "The human race attacked Iraq, after attacking Poland in 1942, and Troy at some point in history" and trying to draw a conclusion.
If you are talking about the Anonymous from 4chan, then there isn't any group like that. That implies to much organisation, a hierachy, an organization.
The idea originally was related but NOT the same to "I am Spartacus". And many people don't even understand that statement.
The "I am Spartacus" statement is this: "I hereby declare that I am the person you are seeking and accept all responsibility for my actions." If you state this, you BECOME Spartacus, you are it and LOOSE yourself with it. You can't say, "I smallfurrycreature represent Spartacus", you surrender yourself to the cause and become it. In the movie, the people all nailed up, are ALL Spartacus and by doing so the idea of Spartacus if not the person becomes invincible. No matter how many Spartacusses you nail to a cross, there is always one more just around the corner. It is the undying hero, the person dies but the idea goes on.
This doesn't sit well with our individual culture.
Anonymous takes this even further, if people understood it. You cannot state "I am Anonymous" for this is silly. The moment you tie yourself to this concept, you are no longer anonymous. You can speak with a thousand voices, you can at best be one voice representing a thousand but never a thousand. You cannot be anonymous only be a non-significant part of it.
The real idea behind it all on 4chan was to give a name to the movements/actions that were observed. It is like watching the migration patterns of animals and calling them Bob. Just because it now sounds like a person doesn't mean that a wildebeast migrating represents Bob or is controlled by the motives of Bob.
Does any of this rant matter
Yes. The Muslim brotherhood, are they the protesters in Egypt? Some western "news" stations would have you believe this. BUT this has NOT been an Islamic revolution. It might or might not become one but the protests where NOT guiden or orchastrated by them... some PROTESTERS might have been but not the "protest". It can be hard to grasp the difference. It is the difference between the resentment of the masses and individual grievances. Same as the protests in Tunesia were not about a closed vegetable stand or in Egypt about the beating of a youth or in France about cake or in the USA about tea.
Anonymous is not a group that exists on 4chan in /b/. If anything it is the behavior of individual but unknown people who use the web to do something in a minimally organised way to have a far reaching effect. It is the mob effect on the internet.
That means that there is no point in ousting its leaders. You can get the leaders of one mob and might even be cheered for that by the mob next to it. Anonymous cheers cat killers and hunts them down. It is not a singleton, it is a class. You can spawn things from it but almost by its nature, the moment you do that is ceases to be the idea and it becomes Anonymous XYZ the group.
Anonymous doesn't have its hands on anything and has its hands on everything because we can all be Anonymous and we all aren't.
But media doesn't grasp that since they need to put a face to the name. But ultimately this means that Anonymous will just get more legenday. Strike one group down and another will take its place. Just as killing a few hundreds protestors, and arresting/torturing far more, did NOTHING to stop the protest in Egypt. Or killing all the buffalo stopped Bob.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Anonymous" is not simply a group that uses anonymity.
Anonymous is an un-group. It is the collection, at any single moment in time, of people attempting to achieve a common goal loosely organized via anonymous internet communications. The anonymous people working on a common goal, can change from day to day or moment to moment. The goal(s) being worked on can change from day to day and moment to moment. A call for action is thrown out in various anonymous Internet places, and some people who frequent those places decide the goal sounds worthwhile to them for various reasons, different for each person. Others decide the goal is not worthwhile and ignores it or calls out the original poster for having selfish reasons for the call to action ("We're not your personal army").
To say there are "members" and a "hierarchy" or even an actual group called "Anonymous" in any normal sense of the word reveals a lack of understanding of the phenomena.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Revealing all of the HBGary emails (whoever named the company this had better not admit it) revealed other things such as the Chamber of Commerce's involvement in a smear campaign. They could turn into a more active form of Wikileaks pretty easily, providing lots of skeletons to gawk at. Truth is far better than fiction.
Wait, so they have a copy of something that was designed to replicate itself and is known to have spread to literally hundreds of thousands of unsecured machines? And they have a binary copy of it? I'm going to write the rest of this post from my bomb shelter.
The media talk about Anonymous like it's some shadowy terrorist super-villain collective, but that's really missing the point. Anonymous is, at its core, the world's most prolific troll. Look at the sites they attacked in the whole WikiLeaks affair. Visa.com and MasterCard.com? It's obvious to anyone with a clue that these are symbolic targets. If they'd had the desire (and arguably the capability) to inflict real damage, they'd have gone after the payment processing infrastructure instead. But their goal isn't to break stuff. It's to do something relatively inconsequential, and see how many media organizations they can get to shit their pants over it.
This is (roughly) the same group whose crowning achievement was getting Oprah to say "over 9000 penises" on national TV. Even if they have the capability to inflict real damage—and some members clearly do—they seem to be more interested in getting attention and playing the media for complete fools. Which is way more entertaining than indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the world.
And that's the bottom line. Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
You mean I wasted all that time tweaking Gentoo to run on my centrifuges? Should I switch to Yellowcake Linux instead?
Anonymity implies lack of hierarchy, because a hierarchy needs identifiers. What you have in mind is pseudonymity. Pseudonyms can be names or even encryption keys which are used for signing messages, but with actual anonymity there is no way to tie a message to a person, and without that you can't have a hierarchy.
(Anarchy does not imply disorder, but it does imply lack of willful structure. When people willfully self-organize, than that is no longer anarchy.)
Signed, AC.
Caveat Utilitor
The San Bruno explosion and reports of Stuxnet affecting operations in Iran occurred around the same time.
And the same time Mubarak resigned, I drove past Washington DC with no traffic delays.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Those who would fit the label of "senior member" would be ones who make the greatest contributions in its high profile exploits (and I'm not talking about wearing Guy Fawkes masks in public) or those who are given the greatest trust, for instance the handful who possessed HBG's email archives before it was put up as a torrent. We can call it a confederacy of individuals if it makes you happier, but you choosing to buy into their mythology does not make such a distinction any less valid.
There clearly are security experts within this confederacy who stand out from your typical school-aged males on 4chan, and the LOIC-using kids who get caught up in the emotions (or the lulz if you wish) behave not unlike human shields for those few individuals who have the both ability and willingness to cause real damage. Some 16 year old kid gets arrested in Europe and takes the brunt of the media attention, and a sliver of sympathy for being a dumb kid, while the provocateurs and black hats remain in operation likely behind proxies and public access points.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
They thought those centrifuges they've gathered were finally going to take down WikiLeaks and spin Assange into prison, but Anon will now put an end to such dreams.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
https://github.com/Laurelai/decompile-dump
Or, infrastructure tends to fail occasionally and someone is throwing this out there for some attention (as to whether it is someone who has operated as 'part' of Anonymous in the past or someone just trying to make them look bad, who knows).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I seriously doubt they'll be able to modify it in any meaningful way. The thing seems to have been designed specifically to hit Siemens centrifuges, which would imply that the creators had some very, very good knowledge of the software used in those centrifuges. I doubt there are too many Anons out there with enough knowledge of how natural gas systems or other dedicated industrial hardware works to do much with Stuxnet.
Not to mention just having the virus doesn't mean much of anything. Stuxnet was all over the place a while back. Big whoop.
It's probably easier to introduce Anonymous as a culture. Saying "Anonymous DDoS'd a website and the FBI is now trying to identify them" is like saying "Punks spray-painted a wall and now the FBi is trying to identify all punks" (you can replace 'Punks' by 'Rappers', 'Goths', 'Bikers' and whatever else).
Once you think of Anonymous that way, you can then try to understand what they really are. Comparing them to an organization or an open, drop-in/drop-out group is much less accurate.
There's lots of 'Anonymous' people who did not take part in any DDoS attacks. Lots of those involved in Project Chanology did not take part in Operation: Payback and many involved in Chanology probably did. Some people call themselves 'Anonymous' because they share the same views or ideals, the same mindset...
Culture is definitely the best way to define Anonymous. Some (many?) adherents of this culture just happen to take part in those DDoS attacks because it fits in with the ideology of their culture. Just like eco-terrorists all happen to have strong environmental beliefs, and yet that doesn't mean that ecologists are all closely tied to eco-terrorism activities.
Who the fuck cares if they have copies of the code?
So do many other private analysts.
And HBGary is a joke of a company.
To say there are "members" and a "hierarchy" or even an actual group called "Anonymous" in any normal sense of the word reveals a lack of understanding of the phenomena.
To say that there are NOT members and a hierarchy or an actual group called Anonymous reveals a lack of understanding of human social dynamics. There most certainly IS a group called Anonymous, composed of members (some more active than others), and organized in a hierarchy.
Someone who just posts random ideas to IRC and is never listened to by anyone is not a high ranking member of the hierarchy. Another guy whose many good ideas are listened to and followed is de facto a high ranking member of Anonymous. Some other guy who often works for the cause, and has carried out many successful attacks, also has status within the group. Just because nobody is able to view the whole system from the top down transparently and SEE who is who and who has status, and judge this based on concrete terms like facts and numbers, since the whole thing is based on anonymity, doesn't mean that said status/ranking does not exist. It is an inherent property of ANY humans working together socially in groups of two or more.
A hierarchy needs identifiers if it's led by merit of names rather than merit of message.
A hierarchy built on message can exhibit structure, yet be anonymous and without persistent leadership.
There is no Cabal, I say!
PS. I think saying "This doesn't sit well with our illusory individual culture." would be somewhat more accurate, BTW.
And I can't help but wonder how similar all those revolutions ultimately might be... in past examples - whatever ideologically-guided people like to believe (and would like you to believe) - economic reasons were the major motivation for uprisings behind the Iron Curtain, for movements of the 80s. Ordinary people simply wanted better pays in relation to rising prices, better benefits, more free days, keeping holiday company funds & assets. They were fed up with some crisis of the moment, when the system was having problems providing goods and services they were used to, at the cost (to them) they wanted.
Political postulates were mostly added by "intelligentsia", piggybacking on mass discontent (and not without support of CIA funds, at the least)
(ironically enough, many former protesters sort of reversed their views when they got what they "wanted", during political & economic transformation - but by then, huge unprofitable workplaces were no longer kept alive by the state, protests directed at the latter couldn't do much)
One that hath name thou can not otter
> reveals a lack of understanding of human social dynamics
Are you sure Anonymous is all humans? I have it on good authority that Dogbert is a high ranking official in Anonymous.
There may be some lizard-people in there as well.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
So, are you saying that all members of Anonymous are equal, but some are more equal than others?
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I think everyone is missing the biggest point of whether or not Anonymous has access to the Stuxnet source code and that is, with the source code the actual creator could possibly be identified. Imagine if HBGary in some way knows what organization created Stuxnet or perhaps they had a hand in helping create it? The repercussions could be quite severe especially if it was as many claimed created by Israel with US backing. The idea in the article of the ways Anonymous could possible modify Stuxnet are simply stupid.
The other thing that everyone seems to be missing is the fact that HBGary also had in their possession a botnet that they were wanting to sell. Who would a company specializing in federal security be trying to sell a botnet to? This totally seems to be their modus operandi. "Hey government! Why create your own botnet that could be traced back to you? We can sell you one for a cheap million dollars!" Sort of the same thing they did with the Wikileaks stuff if you ask me.
And the last thing is how if the release of this information does confirm that some federal/government group did in fact have a hand in Stuxnet or was interested in buying a botnet, how totally idiotic they are in utililizing such an inept company like HBGary to help them. It really says something about security companies that specialize in government security contracts.
1. Download Metasploit/OllyDbg
2. Get Top Secret clearance
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
False. You do not speak for the "rest of the world".
FanFictionRecs.net
There is no such thing as an "Anonymous Hacking Group". There are no senior members, or official members of any kind. You are only a member of anonymous while actively participating. The media has blown this way out of proportion. Most people don't actually understand what Anonymous is(or rather, what it isnt).
Yes, "Anonymous Hacking Group" is a bit stupid. And there may be no "senior members" or "officials", but in any group, no matter how egalitarian, there are natural leaders. I'm guessing a small number of people in Anonymous have a larger effect than the rest; they post the ideas, organize the attacks, provide the links. I've found this true in every group. Hell, being that Anonymous is pretty much a changing ad hoc group, some percentage will participate more than others, and by this they can be said to have more influence, as well.
There is no such thing as a group of equals, hierarchy and power structures self-arise naturally. Anyone who has ever been in a randomly selected group with no enforced power-structure can attest to this.
Also, just because you don't have an identifiable name, doesn't mean you aren't able to lead. There is more to indentify you than a mere name, your speech structure, writing style, style of direction, etc... also provide some amount of pseudo-identity. Look at the "Hosts file" troll who posts here every time a web browser is discussed (with his bold cites, and such), I don't know who he is, he could be you, but I sure as hell recognize his posts on sight.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
. . . though it was seamless pipe having no welds to fail.
Seamless pipe may have no longitudinal weld, but (in most cases, like this case) still has welds at joints and fittings connecting pipe segments together.
I think you forgot the definition of anonymous.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
Nice try, I've never participated or talked with anyone who does any anon ops.
FanFictionRecs.net
Yes and no. He claimed that he wasn't going to release names, and Ars Technica seems to confirm that from publicly released information related to this incident.
However, this tidbit would probably explain why Anonymous retaliated:
Considering that Barr mentioned elsewhere (in the leaked e-mails Ars reported) that he was doing this for publicity and to bring in money--and probably also to bolster his company's name since that wing of HBGary was going to be sold for ~$2 million--I'm not sure you could trust him as far as he could be kicked. Even his programmer expressed concerns with what Barr was doing (both to Barr as well as company executives). So no, Barr never publicly stated he would release names--maybe he did in the leaked e-mails--but the guy was an arrogant tool. I don't condone what Anonymous did, mainly because it hurt many other people in the process, but I can't imagine a more deserving target of public embarrassment than Mr. Barr.
Barr's typing was also atrocious. In a way, I think they should have gone after him for that alone, but I think that's just my inner grammar Nazi talking.
He who has no
I don't really get the point of this article. As dozens of people have said above, who cares.
But if you accept the premise of the article as placing Anonymous somehow in control of something that was previously under the control of Israel, I would say, how stupid can you get? Mossad's most recently exposed assassination was fairly sloppy, but they did kill the guy. That's certainly not the kind of wrath I'd want to bring down on myself.
The internet is one large glass house, Mr JordanL. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Like cholera?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Since you say it's not a group, but a shifting number of people who do what they individually decide, then you can't rail against "all this fucking public anonymous moralfaggotry" and "huge fucking difference between real anon--the way this "group" all started out". You can't have it both ways. The people who identify themselves as Anonymous are, in fact, Anonymous, whether you approve of the changing nature of their behavior or not.
It's like calling someone who treats others in a particularly cruel and sadistic manner "inhuman". Well of course, they're not, they're exactly human. Inhumane perhaps, but not inhuman.
Don't keep correcting people by telling them they're mis-identifying a group or hierarchy in Anonymous, while complaining about the motherfuckers who just don't act how YOU would like them to.
Me, I take them at their word, er, self-identification, and I'm comfortable applying a broad brush to them. They're all Anonymous. And they're all douchebags.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
I'm not suggesting that "anonymous" was responsible, only that an attack using similar software could cause lines to burst. The national NBC reporting that just aired Saturday February 12th failed to mention ANY of the issues that were raised locally.
The welds were of variable quality and of course pressure-induced failure will be at weak spots. Report say there were multiple failures at once. I've been unable to find any explanation as to why the pressure shot up right before the explosion.
The line was a 30" major distribution line about 50 years old run at pressures of up to 400 p.s.i.
P.G. & E. didn't even for sure know what kind of pipe they had, which calls into question whether they even knew how much pressure it could safely handle. Their records are incomplete and some were wrong. They claim to have no records of numerous calls from people reporting smelling gas as far back as two months before the explosion. They've switched their public statements around. It took them about two hours to even get people to a valve to cut off the gas. They had reported that a malfunction caused a pressure spike but later backtracked trying to claim that running the pressure up to the normal limit two years earlier somehow weakened the line. The period in question was summer/fall. If line pressures had to be elevated to overcome demand-related pressure loss in downstream lines that would have been during winter. (more likely to be an issue with the explosions in the eastern U.S.). The utility neglected to install and use any automatic shutoff equipment.
There are clearly problems with the utility company procedures, but it's that recanted malfunction causing pressure spike part that would be consistent with an attack via software.
There were a number of reports by California media regarding what happened. Some pulled offline later.
There are videos on YouTube with various local residents commenting on what happened.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pHP2Kpjo9OgJ:articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-09/news/27020428_1_gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast+gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-11/news/27022021_1_pg-e-gas-line-spike
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816
http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-tv-pgesanbrunopipe,0,4690306.story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3z9VRqxOtE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Uza3-EDRc
The worm is not limited to what's in use in Iran. The people in the field that use Windows systems to spit out the code actually used by the control systems generally don't have the knowledge to disassemble the code and spot problems that aren't immediately apparent (like periodic instability or a timed attack). Given that things like pumping stations aren't set up often, expect that most use outside contractors.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems
The national reporting simply blaming the incident on welds was misleading. At least region
*sigh*
Here's a synopsis.
Olson quotes a source from Anonymous who briefly rattles off the contents of a slew of emails uncovered during the HBGary takedown. “Three different malware archives, two bots, an offer to sell a botnet, a genuine stuxnet copy, and various malware lists,” are supposedly among the contents.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
They go much further than defacing websites. I believe they make demands of their targets and hold databases hostage on a regular basis. Look it up.
Except to the truly incompetent. The media-hype was completely out of proportion with with reality. Stuxnet is a mediocre piece of malware at best, that was created by people that did not really understand what they were doing. The only impressive part of it is the exact intelligence on how the Iranian Uranium centrifuges were wired. Apart from that, Stuxnet is basically a second-rated knockoff of technologies well known and understood.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Grinman is grinning at you.
"The mask of anonymity is not intensely constructive." -- Andrew "weev" Auernheimer
nonconformity at work
substitute "anonymous" with "the USA", and "the rest of the world" with the rest of the world.
one could safely say that there are now two anonymouses. the one that wants to keep it on 4chan, and the one that has become an organised (albeit extremely decentralised) legitimate group with a real structure and points of command (which are transient and relatively anonymous). it's quite clever really.
of course, "oldfags" are irked greatly by the politically active group that has sprung out of them (and goes by the same name).
and anonymous at it's very core is trolls trolling trolls, pissing in an ocean of piss.
as such, i approve of anonymous successfully trolling anonymous.
Are you sure Anonymous is all humans?
furries don't count.
except the senior anons thing is bunk.
there are certain people who have done more "anon" activities than others, people who want to be leaders, or just people who unwisely make themselves too visible.
they are only leaders if their ideas are popular.
let's call anonymous "cloud activism". we don't know where it all is, and it's not relevant.
i know a guy in the mining industry in a position of quite a bit of control over what goes on in a major operation.
first time i met him i caught him using a meme.
i am now scared.
Actually, we call it a "Flash mob". Which also means that outside of arresting the occasional person and trying to make an example out of them (something that, to be honest, will only piss them off or amuse them immensely), they can't really do much about it. What are they going to do, make anonymous internet discussion boards illegal?
Good luck with that, guys.
You have a army of a few thousand (at least) bored computer professionals of questionable ethics and high integrity, alongside a vastly higher number of 13 year olds antagonizing them into doing the things that prior to Anonymous, they would have just sat around the water cooler saying "man, wouldn't it be cool if..."
Perhaps a better course of action for the powers that be would be to stop attempting to criminalize embarrassing journalism like Wikileaks, and start actually investigating murderous pyramid schemes acting like religions, and maybe you won't have the Internet version of mobs wielding pitchforks and torches running around.
I didn't mean to suggest that I thought "Anonymous" had anything to do with the San Bruno event. I don't know very much about them and am not making judgement of them.
That said, Stuxnet really scares me and I hope it isn't used.
I did see a news site posting elsewhere minutes ago to the effect that they were backing something new. I hope they don't get carried away in the emotions of the moment and do anything they might regret.
May people everywhere be free and not live in fear.
Are you kidding, Anonymous did nothing, it does not exist, it is an activism meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group). People do things using the Anonymous name, nothing more.
To say Anonymous has possession of the stuxnet virus, is meaningless nonsense. Anyone at any time can say they are and are not a member of Anonymous, as there is no membership, no leadership, just temporary causes. In fact any false flag event can be named as Anonymous activity if the government professionally paranoid choose to do so, they are of course very unlikely to get much or any support from people who choose to commit reasonable acts of activism in the name of Anonymous.
This is just nothing more than a beat up driven by mass media and in this case likely paid for by Bank of America to obscure it's criminality in invading the privacy of people and their families and BoA's disclosed willingness to fabricate evidence. All in same vain effort to bury a certain hard disk drive likely full of criminal culpability. It isn't in Forbes by accident.
No person can stand up and publicly state they are a 'member' of anonymous, as that act refutes their anonymity and logically any association with the Anonymous activism meme. At the very most people can say, they have done some 'Anonymous' stuff, hmm, which is what you are doing right now on the internet in this forum.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This is an important piece of evidence against Barak-O Vision and his wolves at DHS, DOJ, DOD and DOS.
How important? It links criminal acts by Barak-O Vision's Regime against the sovernty of Iran!
Many have deep troubles with the Theocracy of Iran. Yet that does not exempt Barak-O Vision and his wolves from acts of murder, sedition, espionage, and terrorism.
Indeed!
Barak-O Vision, DOJ, DHS, DOS and DOD are the Terrorists! They are the criminals! They are the lawless. And they will be hanged for crimes against humanity.
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I seriously doubt they'll be able to modify it in any meaningful way. The thing seems to have been designed specifically to hit Siemens centrifuges, which would imply that the creators had some very, very good knowledge of the software used in those centrifuges. I doubt there are too many Anons out there with enough knowledge of how natural gas systems or other dedicated industrial hardware works to do much with Stuxnet.
I would not be so certain of that. It doesn't require that the person working on the devices decides to write a virus for them; consider the extended family. Someone comes along and grabs a few of the specialist's books, maybe reference manuals, and passes those to another activist with a bit of knowledge. Suddenly, the activist has the insider knowledge necessary to target those specific plants. One would hope that a specialist worker in a nuke or gas plant would keep a tighter rein on their plant documentation, but family happens.
To say there are "members" and a "hierarchy" or even an actual group called "Anonymous" in any normal sense of the word reveals a lack of understanding of the phenomena.
Phenomena? It's just a bunch of groups (with or without interchanging members) that operate under the same name. Looking at 'Anonymous' in the context of any one operation clearly reveals a 'group'. If it were just a collection of people attempting to achieve a common goal then the operations would not be coordinated, you can't coordinate such an attack (time, target, and even the cancellation of an operation) without some organisational hierarchy.
I'd have thought the real danger would be of Anonymous using the virus to discover-- or perhaps to claim to have discovered-- the origin of the Stuxnet virus, or information about what was being planned with Stuxnet by those Anonymous obtained it from.
I'm Brian! No I'm Brian! We all know everything Anonymous says should clearly be taken as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. On another note, I'm confused how Anonymous can be in possession of the Stuxnet worm. Does this mean everyone who has ever affiliated themselves with Anonymous is in possession? Or just a few people going by the name? Maybe that was the point, maybe this was meant to confuse use. I don't know any more...
Are you unable to separate work from leisure? Your acquaintance may well be able to, even if you're not.
Allow me to present to you a fundamental fact of the internet: Internet Fuckwad Theory
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The scary thought is that some clever('Anonymous') person might program a socialist engineer to attack Windows World-sys. If Anonymous do that then the world's nuclear infrastructure may very well be in the hands of democrat terrorist herbal Viagra specialists. I am sure that this is all Facebooks fault. Compiling the latest Ubuntu kernel snapshot may save us. But I doubt it.
Seriously this is a non-event.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
A random group of strangers claims possession of stuxnet worm.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.