Slashdot Mirror
Downloads of DoS Attack Tool LOIC Spike
wiredmikey writes "As Anonymous initiated what it said will be the 'largest attack ever on government and music industry sites' in response to actions taken by the Justice Department against operators of file sharing site Megaupload.com, downloads of a popular DoS attack tool have spiked. While the Denial of Service tool known as the 'Low Orbit Ion Cannon' (LOIC) was developed by the 'good guys' to stress test websites, it has been a favorite tool of Anonymous to take its targets offline via denial of service attacks. Interactions seen on Twitter and IRC, made it clear that the action against MegaUpload has sparked many more individuals to get involved in the online protests and download the LOIC to take part in the attacks and has resulted in a massive spike in downloads according Slashdot sister site Sourceforge."
have 2 new search terms to punch into google after the word download!
You're probably going to get caught if you don't know what you're doing.
Those now downloading LOIC are not Anonymous.
Seriously.. their IP has been logged!
Silence is a state of mime.
I recently had an insight about Anon's activities. The reason hactivisim is gaining strength as a movement is because people are disenfranchised with society and seen conventional avenues of affecting change as a waste of time. The 'man' has a tight grip on the media, politicians and the police are being increasingly militarized for use on peaceful protesters.
People are unhappy with the status quo. Unless change starts happening now and fast, I predict Anon's numbers and targets to grow substantially in the coming years.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Elections are coming up, don't give them any ideas for lofty goals that they might try to implement! I've seen them debate, they're all batshit crazy enough to try and do it.
I hope these script kiddies aren't so foolish as to make the same mistakes twice.
Fuck that. I hope they do. DOS attacks are the lamest, most degenerate hacktivism ever. It doesn't change anyone's minds, it doesn't help create a better system, and it just causes damage in the process. The only thing it accomplishes is sating some primal desire for revenge, so I hope they get filtered out of the pool so the rest of us can go back to creating instead of defending.
You want to try to make things better but you're feeling disenfranchised? Subvert the system. Work on decentralized DNS replacements. Work on anonymity networks. Work on improving Bitcoin to make it a serious contender. Generate content and release it for free.
Don't destroy. Create.
... easily dispersed should you strike the shepherd.
Politicians, DoJ, even the RIAA and MPAA, these are mere sheep. Willing scapegoats, but immortal. You cannot destroy them. You must strike at the human minds behind.
Take away the anonymity of the directors of the copyright owning corporations behind this. Expose their secrets. Illuminate their crimes. Dissolve their privacy, pull back the veil behind which they destroy human rights. Ruin their lives. Then tell them why. Tell the world why. Let them be a lesson.
Do not be fooled into thinking your government is against you. Once educated, they will be your greatest ally. But they have been deceived. Strike at the heart of the corruption, not a symptom of it.
I do agree with you, DOS attacks are pointless; however, what options are left? You make a bunch of statements but truthfully, all of them have been tried.
I just had to switch ISPs since my current one decided that SSL connections would be limited to 7kb/s (Yes, just slightly higher than modem speeds) and I work from home and have to use a VPN. There reasoning is simply that file sharers are using SSL and they can't deep packet inspect them so there solution is to rate limit all SSL connections to a barely acceptable speed.
As for subverting the system, or building something new to solve a problem that shouldn't exist, how many times must we do this? How many protocols for file sharing have been created already? They just keep adding laws or abusing laws or trying to force others to do their work for them (ISP, website owners, etc).
Look at megaupload (I'm not a fan and have never used any file service like this) but the simple fact is that that company is no different than any other company (e.g., Google). The fact is that it is (or was) illegal to hold one person legally responsible for the actions of others, but that is exactly what the "law" is doing by arresting the owners of megaupload. At this point of time we no longer have Law (for the people), and without Law their is nothing left. The simple fact is this "token" assault is a peaceful demonstration (aka Internet equivalent of marching in the streets) that should be taken seriously; but as you, and others make clear, it will do nothing and/or provide fodder for even more laws. So at which point does the message have to go from peaceful to non-peaceful? This is what I am scared of as I believe there is little or no chance of a peaceful settlement anymore :( So I will encourage as much of this peaceful demonstration as much as possible for the small glimmer of hope that the message will get across before the worse case occurs....
Back a person (including you) into a corner and sooner or later you realize you have no choice but to attack. High unemployment, unbalanced laws, misappropriation of laws/legal/justice, economic enslavement, loss of hope, loss of freedom, loss of the "american dream", and ignoring the will of the masses are all, in my opinion, signs that the perverbial shit is about to hit the fan....
But keep thinking it's just about some kids that want to have some fun....
Ok so here's the real question.
How many people have to be using it before the MafiAA and their paid goons in the government are required to stop calling it an "attack" and start calling it what it is, a civil protest no different from a lunch counter sit-in?
And neither does a DDoS. Also boycotts sometimes target entire supply chains or industries so I'm not sure that your analogy is anywhere close to be reasonable either from accuracy or as a decent comparison. I'm generally against these actions but acting like they don't have common ground with various disruptive non-violent tactics is silly. They are illegal, non-violent protest tactics just like lunch counter sit-ins wear. The real question is do they have moral legitimacy and will they be able to move beyond the disruptive force into a force that changes policy and cultural attitudes like other non-violent disruptions did in the physical world.
If a lunch counter sit in disrupted a politically well connected business it would be called an attack too.
And linux naming strikes again...
Seriously, that's just bad luck. Half a page after the "script kiddie anti-defamation league" starts a mini-flamewar, and you go and point out that the linux version of the tool has a name that can be easily parsed as "Low IQ?"
Yeesh. You can't make this stuff up. :)
If you want to protest, do so legally and publicly
And inside your designated free speech zone.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Thanks for mentioning this. I'd even go further and emphasize that, in practicing civil disobedience, one should welcome arrest, or at the very least not go out of one's way to evade it. In the words of Thoreau, "under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
In my view, the MegaUpload case isn't even arguably civil disobedience. First, the accused maintain they did not violate any laws, unjust or otherwise. Second, assuming they did, and assuming they believe the laws are unjust, it's quite hard to maintain the moral high ground while also using massive financial gains from violating "unjust laws" to fuel incredibly extravagant lifestyles.
In contrast, The Pirate Bay is a reasonable example. It's overt purpose is to wantonly violate what it believes are unjust copyright laws and to deny media companies the revenue they use to preempt discussion of copyright reform, and its maintainers have used whatever proceeds and attention they have gained from running the site to fuel further political action, not a fleet of expensive cars.
Why, in my day we DoS'd by clicking on slashdot links, and by golly, we liked it!
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Why does "anonymity" have anything to do with it?
When hundreds of thousands of people showed up to hear Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, was there some federal body requiring that everyone sign their name at the gate? Using facial recognition software to try to identify every single attendee? And if there were, would it not have been an infringement of the rights of free expression and association guaranteed by the Constitution?
The "anonymity" of LOIC is furnished in the same way. It is not true and full anonymity, as FBI attacks and raids on previous LOIC participaters have shown. It is merely the anonymity of being in a large group of otherwise non-anonymous people, such that it would either (a) take too much time and effort for the corrupt goons of the FBI to hunt them down or (b) be prohibitively selective to haul off only a few people of a few thousand, ten thousand, or hundred thousand or more to subject to criminal proceedings.
And yes, I'm posting as AC. My point: you don't have to have my name and face to see that what I am saying has value.