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Vatican Attack Provides Insight Into Anonymous
Hugh Pickens writes "John Markoff writes that an unsuccessful campaign against the Vatican by Anonymous, which did not receive wide attention at the time, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance, and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective and may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack. The attack, called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites, was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico and was designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests. First the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own website and social sites like Twitter and Flickr calling on volunteers to download free attack software and imploring them to 'stop child abuse' by joining the cause. It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, then a core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church's World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside. In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps so the hackers turned to a brute-force approach of a distributed denial-of-service, On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day but did not crash the site. 'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,' says Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. 'You have four or five guys who really know what they're doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.'"
A new inquisition to capture and torture these basement dwelling monsters
Cue a large number of comments that incorrectly state that "Anonymous isn't anyone", "Anonymous is everyone", "Anonymous is an idea", etc.
I think he's giving them too much credit by far.
This is far less satisfying than folks make it out to be.
The organization they were attacking.
In Spain? I wasn't expecting that.
" a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots" Sounds like slashdot...
Perhaps I'm just a bit more in tune (yeah right...), but, didn't we know this is pretty much how they operated? A bunch of LOICers combined with a couple of guys scattered across the globe who actually know wtf they are doing? The most interesting thing about this is that you have all these intelligence think tanks, the CIA, the FBI, etc. that Anon has managed to infiltrate or get through their security, yet the Vatican remains untouchable? Exactly what kind of stuff are they hiding that they need or implement better security measures than our intelligence services?
Calling the core trolls geniuses is an overstatement. Most of them are just scriptkiddies whose most sophisticated attacks are correctly guessing when the password is 12345. The strategy of Anonymous is to try hacking against easy targets and DDoS against well-secured ones. And while DDoS is relatively easy to implement, the LOIC those "geniuses" came up with is a crappy tool.
propaganda and These early Mod points and grandstanders, the this is consistent ASSOCIATION OF recent Sys Admin claim that BSD is a of the founders of prospects are very our ability to [samag.com] in the Win out; either the Can coonect to don't ffel that vitality. Like an to this. For Sux0r status, *BSD
No one was.
" 'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,' says Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. 'You have four or five guys who really know what they're doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.'"
That's how governments and empires work(ed) and were built. They teach it in classes, so why not put it to good use?
Obviously, Anonymous is NOT the Spanish Inquisition, since according to them, EVERYONE should expect the Anonymous Inquisition!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,"
You can probably say this about most organizations in the world.
The Zeitgeist Movement
In the course of human history, the power of any group, be it a tribe, guild, religion, government, or corporation, has always been about a relatively small number of clever people surrounding themselves with a much larger number of useful idiots.
This morning on NPR’s The Takeaway, annoyingly shrill-voiced, and hysteria-edged voiced, Celeste Headcase, interviewed the Brookings Institution, by way of Noah the Shackman, also a contributing editor to Wired (read any verifiably informative articles there in the last 10 years?????).
While Shackman did mention a few truthful facts, among Celeste Headcase’s constant barrage of snarky anti-Wikileaks comments, he sadly suggested everything Anonymous is doing is “highly illegal” – were that he would mention the same about the millions of crimes perpetrated by the banksters, insurance companies, lending processors, et al.; funny how that always escapes mention?
no one is anonymous.
Silence is a state of mime.
Nothing more need be said.....
a bunch of wacko zealots that actually hate the stuff they attack, or a bunch of really smart operators hiring themselves out, knowing that with the right arguments can attraqt a bunch of idiots to attack anything they want?
A relevant article.
Then retract that head out of your skanky butt, and do something more brilliant, sonny.....
I understand when uninformed news sites give importance to this kind of events, but isn't Slashdot a technology site?
Aren't you supposed to know that this is no more than a circus ran by unskilled cry babies?
Is it that hard to understand that this kind of crap is even more useless than throwing rocks at government buildings?
'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,'
Handful is pushing it. There can't be more than 2 or 3 who can truely frame a movement mentality instead of the usually "I don't like XXX, lets attack my personal army!"
Cole Stryker has - HAS - to be a pen name, right?? Totally sounds made up.
thats-the-joke.jpg
On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day but did not crash the site.
The only way that evil can win is if good people fail to act. If the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ started by a divine Jesus Christ, then obviously wicked men practicing their pedophaelia or hackers targeting it's website cannot destroy the Church. Metaphorically speaking, they can load the pistol and pull the trigger but the weapon will misfire, their aim will be off, the shot will be deflected, or something else will happen that prevents the shot from reaching the target. Just sayin...
This whole thing reads like the PayPal protest back in 2010. So, um, what's new?
The attack, called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites, was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico and was designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests.
How exactly was crashing the website going to have any effect on the event in meatspace? I can see anon causing some damage to a dotcom company, but this isn't The Matrix. I'm sure the church doesn't have any critical infrastructure tied to their website, and last I checked most still used books. You know, that old information storage system that operates just fine without electricity.
I bet next anon will be protesting Black Friday by attacking Walmart's site, and they'll be shocked when no on even notices the increased traffic.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
the LOIC those "geniuses" came up with is a crappy tool.
dude, if you think you can do better you can do better. Unless your kvetching about underlying design or strategy flaws.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...because God knows who they are; therefore, they aren't anonymous.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Attacking the Catholic Church in 2012 over the priest abuse scandal is like attacking Britain over John Major's policies.
The abuse scandal was a pattern of abuse and cover-up that exploded into the media spotlight in the late 80s/early 90s. The Church did wrong, but since then, they've done a lot of right - there's a zero-tolerance policies, lots of priests have been defrocked, billions in settlements have been paid, hundreds were jailed, etc. There will always be sexual abuse in any large organization with access to children - schools, Boy/Girl scouts, the YMCA, the Mendocino Physics Club, Gencon, whatever. So yes, there may be some that goes on today on a small scale...but what has changed is the organizational response. In 1970, a Bishop might have shuffled a pedophile priest to a different parish. Today, there's zero tolerance, formal processes, and a much greater awareness.
So...why attack in 2012? What is the point? If this was 1990, it'd be more understandable.
I think "anonymous" (aka a half-dozen bored kids) is just desperate to remain in the spotlight. The attention-getting is more important than any "cause". In fact, attention-getting is the cause.
Advice: on VPS providers
The description "a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots" fits almost any organization of more than a few dozen people. Pick any large organization you want, from a political party to a Fortune 500 company, and 20% of the people actually get things done, while 80% of them are placeholders to justify the departmental budgets.
I don't think so.
"A handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots".
Well, duh. That is the time-honored approach to power used by every political organization/religion in the world. A small group of people manage to convince a large number of people to become puppets/tools - ostensibly to serve some "higher purpose" - but in reality merely giving power to the small number of people for their own gain.
It just seems to be human nature that most people will line up and blindly engage in abhorrent behavior if someone else tells them to do so. An authority figure telling them what they want to hear (irrespective of how absurd it may be) is a well-known approach to getting the sheep to line up. The fact that they are being used for someone else's gain seems to fall into some sort of genetic blind spot. Hence why we have so many atrocities inflicted on each other.
If you want some disturbing science related to seeing just how far the 'common man' will go in response to a random authority figure, go read the Milgram Experiment. It will leave you with a healthy distrust of the people sharing this planet with you.
If I had the points...
I believe I heard that churches are statisically safer than schools or sports programs. Or this is used as an excuse to allow priests to marry (most of the issues was male on male action so marriage wouldn't help). Unfortunately, many people blindly drink the Kool-Aid.
In Spain? I wasn't expecting that.
We should all declare a holy war - they are currently releasing info along with Wikileaks about an IN PROGRESS attack to stop Iran from gaining nuclear capabilities. There are political reasons making them the only fucking idiots breaking news about it before success - their practically taking the first information management steps required for WW3.
In Spain? I wasn't expecting that.
Actually, in Spain, nobody expects the Papal Inquisition. The gangs protect their respective territories.
Ezekiel 23:20
I am Anonymous.
This isn't hacking, there's no skill, it is just having more bandwidth available than your target and being a dick. Of course that only works if you actually can have more bandwidth. As they found out Amazon didn't even blink, Amazon has WAY more resources than some dumbass script kiddies.
It would be easier and more effective to maintain silence and truncate their index.html.
I never could understand the Catholic's refusal to let priests marry, considering that one of the Apostles (Peter maybe? I'd have to look it up) said that men should marry to avoid being tempted into sinful sex, and there's surely not much that's more sinful than raping children.
I get a lot of history across my plate sideways as it were, since my wife is a history and English teacher. It's kinda fun actually -- she's already mostly vetted the books by the time they make it to the house, so I don't have to slog through lots of BS to find the good reads. :)
On-topic here, the reason the Church (big-C Catholic Church) explicitly outlawed the clergy marrying was because of clergy folks setting themselves up as little hereditary fiefdoms, complete with lines of succession and all the fun politicking and internecine warfare that usually accompanies such an arrangement. Disallowing marriage meant breaking that line of power, and is not too dissimilar from policies at the State Department that forcibly rotate diplomats -- this prevents anyone from getting too cozy (at least in theory).
In more detail, celibacy was general Church policy possibly as far back as AD 300 and is certainly mentioned in the mid-400s. This policy was often overlooked though in the hurly burly of northern European politics, and it wasn't explicitly decreed against until the mid-1000s with the Gregorian reforms. Suffice it to say that it's complicated, but the crux of the issue was inheritance and power struggles related to it.
There's plenty more online via Google, or starting from this Wikipedia article.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You may have a thousand people that can port scan, but out of the thousand maybe 2 would know what to do to get into a system.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
"________ is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots."
(noun)
This is gonna be fun.
Anonymous is, in effect, practicing an eclectic combination of bits of espionage, sabotage and warfare. (For that matter, so is WikiLeaks.) Eventually, they will run up against people who don't think that should be confined to the online world when it has real world consequences. I really wonder if they've considered what happens then.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,'
this line is simply funny. You could replace Anonymous with anything you want, any company or entity that exist and you know when you think about it, it would still make a lot of sense. lol
Why is it if something like this were done against the Jews or Muslims it would be considered a hate crime but against the Catholics people feel it is okay? Why don't all of the politically correct types denounce this? Unless it is secretly condone by them.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
If I choose to post a comment and not have my name attached to it (Anonymous) does that make me a member of Anonymous or just another willing pawn?
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Seems to be a gap in education of Anonymous there. If they had gone through a Catholic school they would have known:
Don't mess with the Sister in charge. She knows what you are up to.
'You have four or five guys who really know what they're doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.'
surely everyone already suspected this...
Consistency and doing the popular thing (hating the church in this case) don't mix very well.
and may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack.
They act as if tracking Anonymous is any difficultly at all. The group is highly transparent. Finding them and following them on specific issues or OPS is not difficult at all. All you need is an strong interest in the subject matter, plenty of time on your hands, and a huge bucket of popcorn.
Anon backed off on the Zetas once people started getting strung up
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The report says that attacking browsers (yes, browsers, not PCs) were all targeted at the same URL with a few randomized URL values thrown in to force the server to treat them as separate requests. The key to defeating a DDOS, as I understand it, is to be able to separate legal requests from illegal, and route them to different places. If every attacker attacks with almost the exact same URL signature, doesn't that make it trivially easy to defeat? Am I missing something?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Our chief weapon is LOIC... LOIC and HOIC...HOIC and LOIC.... Our two weapons are HOIC and LOIC...and ruthless legion of idiots.... Our *three* weapons are HOIC, LOIC, and ruthless legion of idiots... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Anonymous... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as HOIC, LOIC.... I'll come in again.
sweet
Good try samzenpus, not!
If my government is currently attacking Iran. That means my nation is at war with Iran and everything that entails. You're damn straight I want to know about that.
If you think these are the first info management steps to WW3, what the hell is an IN PROGRESS attack on Iran going to lead to?
No one ever does.
The priest class abducted the psychedelic sacraments that constituted man's ritual diet, taking knowledge of god from us, and claimed to have it hidden in reserve somewhere. The priests claimed to be able to barter with us for knowledge of god, the most precious thing we ever knew, so we started giving them everything we had, hoping for scraps of it. Knowledge of god was the most precious thing we ever knew. Priests are the ultimate muggers and cheats, the first capitalists. And what they claim to be trading with, their currency, is knowledge of god they in reality no longer have, but we miss it so badly, we'll give them anything in supplication to the lie
So they made the sacrament a placebo, the Eucharist, and told us the closest we'll come to god on our own is reading the Bible
You can still take mushrooms or acid and know god in your home, initiate yourself into adulthood the way man always has done, and have religion back, a living religion, not a 2000-years-dead one. That's all I need to say about this
Peace
What would be our chief weapon?
Anonymous is extremely transparent as far as political organizations go.
The priest abuse scandal was dealt with in the 90s in the US, but it has not been dealt with in all countries which have experienced abuse. Still abuses are being documented:
- The graphic Irish report in 2011.
- The German abuses that came to light in 2010:
- Dozens of other examples.
It's only ancient history where you come from. The rest of the world hasn't necessarily come to terms with it yet. South America is the next on the list, and just wait until Africa is processed.
"Attack"? I am sure that the people involved consider it a protest. I see little difference in a person voluntarily committing their computer to a Denial of service action against an organisation's web presence to a person voluntarily committing their time to physically protest outside an organisation's building.
A new inquisition to capture and torture these basement dwelling monsters
Starting with the pedophiles!
Recruiting a zealot into grabbing a fresh copy of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), installing it, and putting it into 'Hive Mind' doesn't take that much effort. Clickjacking, clearjacking, cookie poisoning, cache poisoning, cross site scripting, cross site script forgery, and the old favorite: SQL injection can all be scripted in, but at least are more work. More advanced attacks like packet injection man in the middle attacks and other more advanced attacks require knowledge. Since so many sites are so badly configured, one of the above will get in (the DDOS attack works on everyone, but some sites like Amazon can basically ramp up extra servers, load balancers and memcache boxes on the fly, so as more LOIC machines join in, more machines boot and take the load: and "hive mind" is suddenly looking at "Beowulf cluster server").
"A handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots" describes the whole human race, not just anonimous. Any human organization - be it a corporation, a country, or a classroom - with a big enough number of members will look like that.
That's a pretty ignorant comment. The American Church, which has been providing free healthcare via charity hospitals for generations now, objects to being forced to pay for its employees (who, after all, sorta knew they were working for a Catholic organization to start with) to recieve "free" abortifacients- which is against the tenets of Catholicism.
Either you're totally ignorant about the issue, or you've been propagandized like a good little tool.
pedophile will target predominately work where they have contact with children. It isn't new. But the government is TRYING at least to put obstacle and certainly DO NOT shuffle pedophile professor or teacher in anotehr district.
Furthermore I would argue it is much more important to compare the number of pedophile in church not agaisnt somewhere where you would expect pedophile to sneak in, but agaisnt the average pedophile rate. And yes pedo rate are higher in church. School are not pretending to be moral bastion. Church are pretending to be moral bastion and example. This is where the fucking significant difference is.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"exact same URL signature, doesn't that make it trivially easy to defeat? "
Still takes processor time/cycles to deal with the requests... throw enough of them at a target and they tend to fall over.
Some of the greatest victories in history can be described as a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots, that generally turns out to be a pretty successful recipe.
A legion of geniuses turns out to be chaos, as does a legion of idiots.
Classic! Thank you. That made my day.
So does atheism. So does any ideology I can think of (oh it's just that one form of atheism, not this one, right ? Well, that's exactly how communists see it)
As far as religions go, frankly, Christianity's history is rather peaceful. But most religions history is unknown, and the "default" thought seems to be that what is not known must be peaceful. This leads to stupidities like calling buddhism peaceful, calling native american society "nonviolent" or "in harmony with nature". Now read the a few accounts of encounters with that society. Note how little harmony with nature ... note how very, very violent they were (I'm sure it was always the historian's fault, right ? Suuuure, mostly people were attacked the moment they crossed unmarked borders. Additionally tribes fought eachother periodically with the purpose of wiping out neighboring tribes, stealing women and children). Some people even call islam peaceful, which committed it's first genocide before there were 100 muslims, more than a hundred years before even the first mention of the quran. Again. Just plot the wars, both "real" and civil wars on a map of our planet. Now mark the borders of muslim majorities on that same map. Heh ... suuuure, they must be peaceful.
Hinduism was relatively peaceful. So was Confucianism, and so was Christianity. If there's any religion or ideology you're going to call less violent than Christianity, then please pick one of those.
And then there are non-religious ideologies that are called peaceful, despite their more than bloody history. Prime example here is of course socialism. It baffles me how anyone can call an ideology that's "credited" with half a billion dead bodies in the last century alone peaceful. The very ideology that came with the beautiful concept called "eugenics". It baffles the mind.
In Europe you have people (yes, today, not 50 years ago) calling Nazism the only ideology that is peaceful over the long-term (because genetic improvement will lead to perfection which means no wars, get it ?). It is scary to see that this portion of Europe's political landscape is much bigger than, say America's communists, and they certainly exceed 5%, maybe even 10% of all Europeans.
So here's a thought. There are 3 big incidents in the history of Christianity, and a dozen smaller ones. That history spans over 2000 years, couple of hundred thousand dead. In socialism's 150 year old history, we're talking dozens of big wars, hundreds of millions dead. In islam's 1300 year history, we're talking hundreds of wars, hundreds of genocides constantly occurring over their entire history, hundreds of millions dead. In atheism's various uptics (it doesn't really have a continuous history at all) we're talking short periods with near-constant and intensive warfare, sometimes genocide, mostly in conjunction with other non-religious ideologies, where even a few incidents quickly add up to millions dead. Is atheism as violent as, say, socialism ? No probably not. But it's far less peaceful than Christianity.
It seems to add up with the logical way to think about atheism. It requires you to have a sort of utility based value system. So of course atheists see value in (some) wars, for example. They don't see value in war in itself, like muslims do ("dar al harb", or hisbah-"export" if you like), but they also don't think it a disaster no matter the potential rewards, like Christians do. This seems to me the way the ideologies work. Likewise, there are ideologies that use violence for ideological reasons (e.g. Nazism - to create racial purity, Communism - to overthrow the burgeoisie) and ideologies that see wars as a negative in itself (e.g. subsistense anarchists, I can't really find one), and ideologies that calculate (e.g. capitalism and the well known oil is worth fighting over)
Then again, I'm a bit of a contrarian. The more people scream something is true, the less I believe it. I mostly think that there's a reason so much screaming is required. And
And why couldn't anonymous break-in ?
The Vatican has better security than the DoD ?
I guess everybody just assumes God is protecting them, that must be why nobody finds it curious that their systems are so secure.