Slashdot Mirror
The Lesson of Recent Hacktivism
itwbennett writes "LulzSec says they're retired, which may or may not be true. But one thing the world has learned from their 'frightening yet funny escapades is that 'the state of online security stinks,' writes blogger Tom Henderson. LulzSec (and Anonymous) have 'demonstrated that an awful lot of people are either asleep at the switch or believed in arcane security methods like security through obscurity.'"
A related story at the Guardian suggests that governmental attempts to control the internet are spurring these activities.
LulzSec might have ended, but I can guarantee you the exact same stuff is happening underground, except this time you probably won't know all your information has been stolen. Other than exposing corrupt whitehats I don't really agree with their actions, but I'm not sure if the alternative of keeping it in the hands of underground blackhats and IRC scriptkiddies is any better (not that is wasn't going on during LulzSec as well, but still).
Regardless, the AntiSec movement seems to be picking up some steam, at least within Brazil (protests are planned for July 2nd), and the first AntiSec release has just been posted to Pirate Bay: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6502765 with more promised tomorrow.
Regardless of their "supposed" script kiddie status (they did break into a hacking contest website and turned down the 10k), I think it was smart for them to disband and take up a greater cause, and I guess time will tell if they are successful or just run out of water.
Here's the thing: information security, just like any other type of security or insurance, is completely relative.
My dinky little websites have adequate capacity to serve the few hundreds of people a day who visit them, but would not withstand a Slashdotting or DDoS. My house is secure enough to resist a burglar, but not secure enough to resist a Navy SEAL strike team. Does this mean I'm negligent? No, it means that I could spend thousands of dollars on additional infrastructure for security or capacity but I choose not to because it's highly unlikely I would need to.
That's why the example of LulzSec is pathethic and not instructional. There are lots of "soft targets" on the Internet (in terms of security or capacity) that you could take down pretty easily if you wanted to, just because those sites can't justify full-time security teams or massively extensible infrastructures. I'm not talking about high-profile sites like Sony or the CIA, but stuff like EVE login servers or some county in Arizona. A bunch of douchebag script kiddies taking down some MMO server doesn't necessarily mean that anyone was truly "negligent," it just means that they picked easy targets. And there is not, nor will ever be, a shortage of easy targets on the Internet if you're willing to aim at those.
"95% of all Slashdot
They believed that money spent on security products == we are secure. They were not asleep..
Except that, according to the reports, Sony had servers for development which were fully protected with firewalls etc. and which were not hacked / hackable (by LulzSec) and other servers for customer data where they hadn't made any investment. So they hadn't spent that money. You may be right they weren't asleep. Someone made a conscious choice that customer data is not important, but it's not that they had made any of the investment they should have done.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();