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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."
In other news: Iran claims posession of the Stuxnet virus as well
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
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.
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.