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Anonymous Supporters Tricked Into Installing Trojan
dsinc sends this quote from a Symantec report:
"In 2011, dozens of Anonymous members who participated in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in support of Anonymous hacktivism causes were arrested. In these DDoS attacks, supporters using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon denial-of-service (DoS) tool would voluntarily include their computer in a botnet for attacks in support of Anonymous. In the wake Anonymous member arrests this week, it is worth highlighting how Anonymous supporters have been deceived into installing Zeus botnet clients purportedly for the purpose of DoS attacks. The Zeus client does perform DoS attacks, but it doesn’t stop there. It also steals the users' online banking credentials, webmail credentials, and cookies. The deception of Anonymous supporters began on January 20, 2012, the day of the FBI Megaupload raid."
Further proof the bulk of "anonymous" are just brainless sheep on image boards.
Anonymous members don't have bank accounts.
Installing software that allows a third party to orchestrate DDoS? Sounds legit...
It would not surprise me if they are doing the same to make Anonymous look like evil crackers and criminals.
Anonymous does a pretty good job of that themselves, if you ask me.
After taking the prescribed pills, notonly have the nefarious Italian disinformation transmissions stopped coming from my espresso maker and shampoo bottles, but I also have become importent, which has sadly caused mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses to desert me. Good riddance,they were probably secret Italina agents anyway who left when they could no longer program my toaster-oven to hypnotically deceive me. Better fewer but better, I say.
"mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses"? Yeah, Silvio, I know you got tossed out of office; is that why you're so angry at Italy?
The pocket money they get from mummy and daddy doesn't make it worth while.
Time for the sheep to be sheared....
We are supposed to feel bad for these guys that were attempting to engage in premeditated malicious behavior, and in doing so they ended up getting robbed by someone else that took advantage of their stupidity?
It sounds like your basic con: Person #1 offers something Person #2 wants at a great deal. Person #2 is really greedy, and tries to trick Person #1 into a deal where Person #1 is at a disadvantage. Person #1 agrees to this as Person #1 was never at a disadvantage and Person #2 would have lost regardless of how the deal went down, whether under the original terms, or the new terms that Person #1 manipulated Person #2 into creating.
Although sometimes the original terms of the deal are extremely beneficial to Person #2 and they only become detrimental when Person #2 decides to change the terms.
Yeah, screw the government.
Just the other day, I learnt that the awful smell of natural gas is actually because of something they add to gas and that it wouldn't smell if they didn't have it! Now, whenever my pilot light goes off or I don't quite turn the oven off, my house absolutely stinks! The smell's so bad that last time it happened, when I wanted to smoke, I had to go outside, and get well away from the house to escape the smell!
Why can't the government accept that not everyone uses these so called 'dangerous substances' like they seem to think they should be used?
The summary and TFA seem to hint that this is an FBI sting, but the details don't seem to support that.
Maybe more will come out about it later.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But how do you knooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow?
(All tin foil based headwear products 50% off, this Sunday only!)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Yup. There is very little that "Anonymous" does that I could get behind, and even then their means (DDoS? It is to laugh) is silly as it does little damage.
If you attack the front facing site (eg www.paypal.com) you do nothing. If you attack the transaction infrastructure, then maybe you offline and inconvenience a few hundred people in one time zone.
With a lot of stuff moving "To the could" DDoS's become an easily solved problem by opening new instances and shutting down the previous ones. If you have bottomless amounts of money you just open more new instances until the DDoS is unsustained.
Now ... the way to fuck over cloud infrastructure with a DDoS is to actually use their own infrastructure against them. Hijack peoples wordpress blogs on EC2 and then crush the target site with AB. Whoever owns the instance will probably discover the compromise within 4 hours.
Seriously, the only purpose of a DDoS is to prevent somebody from being able to speak. I'm a huge advocate of freedom of speech, I love it when everybody is able to say whatever they want to say, and that includes people I don't like. I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as anybody, but I want them to be able to say what they say. Websites are a form of speech, regardless of whether their purpose is to sell goods or to issue propaganda.
When you shut down those websites (like anonymous tried to do with the vatican) you are no better than the mafia; just trying to shut somebody up for the sole purpose that you don't like them. To these people, freedom of speech is good but only when they agree with the person who is speaking. That is just fucked up and goes against everything our democracy stands for; so I say fuck anonymous. If they want to spread the truth about the bad things that an organization does (like they did with scientology,) that is perfectly acceptable, but shutting them up is not.
To me this is poetic justice. No, I don't like to see people getting their identity stolen, but participating in inhibiting somebody else's ability to speak is just bad form, and I hope they get prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
And this, people, is why you should only download software from the devs website.
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
That Anonymous does not have any moral ground to stand on. Sure they may fight the man, but they'll have no compunction about robbing you blind either. That's not Robin Hood its street punk gangsta with a computer.
Silence is a state of mime.
I have about as much sympathy for the people victimized by this scheme as I do for people that sign up for 419 scams where the come-on letter is clearly asking the recipient to engage in money laundering, theft, and blatant violations of tax and banking laws.
If you install malicious software on your computer on purpose, I have ZERO sympathy for you when it turns out the software includes you in the list of victims.
To be fair they poisoned industrial alcohol that had poison labels on it, and it was no secret either.
Industrial alcohol is used in quite a lot of applications, but to not be taxed for creating a alcoholic liquid the manufactures had to make it toxic. In the middle of prohibition when it was obviously not working, organized crime had hired chemists to de toxify the stuff, they increased the poisons put into the stuff to make it undrinkable again. This time apparently it was to much for the criminal chemists, not that that stopped them from selling it to everybody.
The US government did kill thousands and thousands doing this, but adding poisons to a products that is clearly labelled as poison is not a horrible crime.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I think Anonymous basically are 4 - 5 really skilled people that really knows what they're doing, the rest is just a bunch of posers and script-kiddies that does whatever Anonymous want them to do - in fact, the worst posers probably does exactly what anonymous doesn't want them to do as well, since there are no real connection between them, no real mail, no real addresses - just random causes that some follow or not.
If there's an outrage in the world, it's very easy to make a distorted video, put on a guy fawkes mask, and post it on youtube via a tor connection. Any idiot can do that.
And of course there are crackers with malicious intent, they're pretty much like any other criminals, just using computer knowledge (borrowed from real hackers) to steal and destroy for purposes only known to them.
That's it - really...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
How sad is it that I can't just assume that you're joking?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I was having a look at one annonymous IRC channel more than a month ago, and I saw a few guys asking for a link to the "LOIC without the trojan".
I assume this is the same one they are talking about in this article; so this not relly new.
The lack of evidence alone is proof of a conspiracy!
I find it quite ironic that Symantec, a company whose "antivirus" utilities allow the most virii into machines (both O/S and the antivirus software itself) and exhibits the most virus-like behavior when you try and remove it, is publishing the report.
I've had quite a few associates with virii over the last 12 months and each and every one of them had either Symantec Internet Security, McAfee or MS Security that were supposedly defending their systems. Every case of infection required a complete O/S reinstall to recover from the damage with the only exception of one client who opted to buy new machines.
FYI, there is a site called virscan.org where you could upload an infected/suspect file and they will run it through a host of antivirus software and provide results of each one. Each of the aforementioned products has been very poor on most of these, especially the EXE's masquerading as PDF's coming in via email.
I really don't have a horse in the race, but based on results from virscan.org, ESET NOD32 is the best recommendation as of late as it recognized all the samples I could throw at it. A real solution would be for MS to "sandbox" installed software to at least protect the O/S from infection, compatibility be damned, but I'm sure that won't happen.
As for the Anonymous angle, anything I would say has been said.
-- L8R, guitardood
I installed a virus on my computer! I didn't realize it would do something bad!
Spread links to "LOIC" downloads through Twitter, Facebook and random forums. Attain control of hundreds, if not thousands of computers. This is why you verify a clean source for your downloads, so you don't get infected by viruses. It's part of the Common Sense 2012 Anti-Virus Suite.
No, 4chan's message warned about JavaScript Spam: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/JavaScript - there has never, to my knowledge, been a warning about general files, because those files don't attack 4chan and so they don't care.
pwn3d.
actually yea, i saw this video on youtube with a masked guy asking to download hoic and or loic for an attack on facebook (what they would want to achieve with that is a bit unclear ... blacking out facebook for a few hours has like zero consequence or political impact imo) sounded a bit like testosterone headbutting contest ... so i download it and scanned them both, avira gave nothing but housecall found malware in one of them ... so that's what i posted in a reply to the video ...
i dont know who would be so smart as to just download something from anyone with a mask thats available anywhere and install it without scanning but apparently some people did ... stupid?
It's a piece of software intended to be used for DDOSing (even if participating is voluntary)... Did you really expect it not to register as malware if it's "legit"? I fail to see the point of scanning it in the first place.
Anyways... "Anonymous" is a banner like "Feminism". Anyone can label themselves as such if they feel like it. So different kinds of people apply the term to themselves that the term itself is essentially meaningless. Interesting thing isn't what Anon stands for but rather the fact that so many people (from gamers to script kiddies to half-competent security guys) want to be part of that social movement. Medium is the message, etc.
Tells you something about the fucked up moral standards that he's being persecuted for sleeping with minors and not his political atrocities...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The difference being that adding a scent to natural gas saves lives, but adding poison to industrial alcohol definitely kills people. At least tens of thousands of people died from alcohol the government intentionally poisoned during prohibition. The government's position, of course, was that it was entirely the fault of the bootleggers who distilled that alcohol for human consumption and of the people who drank it. The reality is that it was a terror campaign run by the US government and the fact that those who died were breaking the law doesn't in any way excuse it.
...works.
It really does amaze me that humans ever managed to crawl out of the evolutionary cesspool. We spend far too much effort attempting to protect the stupid. We should let the universe do much more pruning of the dead wood. Here's your sign...
No it was poisonous, industrial alcohol has always needed to be poisoned to be legal they just changed the ingredients of this poison to stop people getting around it.
And they did not add poison to kill people, they added it to make it not drinkable. They underestimated organised crime's greed and peoples desire for alcohol.
I assure you, at no point was anyone trying to secretly poison prohibition criminals.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yeah, screw the government.
Just the other day, I learnt that the awful smell of natural gas is actually because of something they add to gas and that it wouldn't smell if they didn't have it! Now, whenever my pilot light goes off or I don't quite turn the oven off, my house absolutely stinks! The smell's so bad that last time it happened, when I wanted to smoke, I had to go outside, and get well away from the house to escape the smell!
Why can't the government accept that not everyone uses these so called 'dangerous substances' like they seem to think they should be used?
Just open your Windows.
No it was poisonous, industrial alcohol has always needed to be poisoned to be legal they just changed the ingredients of this poison to stop people getting around it.
Your statement is self-contradictory. You claim that the industrial ethanol was somehow magically poisonous despite the fact that, as you admit, it was only poisonous in order to kill people who tried to drink it. Now, some industrial alcohol did need more distillation to be safer for consumption while other industrial alcohol conversely was contaminated with benzene (although in pretty much safe trace amounts) from the extreme distillation process it had been through (to remove all the water). None of it was toxic on anything like the levels it became toxic after the poisoning program. Also, that "always needed to be poisoned" scenario you mention isn't really true. That program started during prohibition.
You said that "they did not add poison to kill people, they added it to make it not drinkable". The reason that it wasn't drinkable after the poison was added was because it killed people. The poison was a terror weapon designed to terrify people away from bootlegged alcohol for fear that they would die. To accomplish this goal, the poisoners were deliberately killing people.
I believe you that at no point were they trying to _secretly_ poison prohibition criminals. It wasn't much of a secret, they were reasonably up front about it. They did keep the information on the constantly changing mixture of poisons they were using secret so as to present a moving target to the chemists working for the bootleggers, however. The obvious consequence of this is that the bootleggers would be selling safe alcohol made from industrial alcohol one day and the next batch would be poisonous. You can claim that the poisoners were just naive innocents. I think that's unlikely, but even if it's true, it still makes them guilty of manslaughter.
Once again Anonymous has proven it isn't about robbing the rich and giving to the poor. They're out to fuck anyone who will sip from their cocktail they left unattended. Those who were compromised: you deserved it, now learn from it.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Did the government release the information that they poisoned the alcohol? If they did, then it WAS the fault of the bootleggers and the drinkers.
No, 4chan's message warned about JavaScript Spam: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/JavaScript - there has never, to my knowledge, been a warning about general files, because those files don't attack 4chan and so they don't care.
So it must be the truth, cause you never heard. Wait..........what's that on your shirt..............uh sir your retard is showing.
-- L8R, guitardood
The self-proclaimed "elite hackers" don't even know enough about system security to protect THEMSELVES. I absolutely LOVE it when the arrogant get taken down a notch through their own ineptitude.
Mind you, these are the same people that are surprised when police and three-letter agencies come a-knockin' at their doors with charges in South America and elsewhere. I find it so amusing that "security experts" don't understand how easy it is for three-letter agencies with access to ISP resources to track an attacker down.
The only thing that protects Anonymous from massive prosecutions is their sheer numbers -- there are too many of them for them all to be prosecuted, the same as for bit-torrent downloaders. So the three-letter agencies go after the few who seem to be coordinating and coding things, rather than the thousands of "members" who turn their machines over to participate in DDOS attacks under the control of someone else.
Nelson of "The Simpsons" said it best:
Ha-Ha!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is too hilarious. Anonymous types sit on a high horse claiming to be not only elite hackers, but smarter than the rest of us. The fact that many of them fell for an FBI trojan is too funny. The group as a whole has had a 'holier than thou' attitude and they've appointed themselves as judge, jury and hacksecutioner, so I find it too funny that they got hacked. When they finally get caught and eventually arrested I'll bet they'll cry in front of a judge when they face serious criminal charges. Can't wait. Maybe someone could make a crying Guy Fawkes mask?
“We are Onymous.
“Oops.”
That is a case of good intervention. It actually helps.
Here is a case of bad intervention.
UPS finds out it will cost them x number of dollars to fly over Europe to pay for 'carbon taxes'. "OH ok" they say. "We will just fly the longer flights over africa, russia, and the Mediterranean as it will be cheaper".
you think Russia would let people fly over it's land for free? haha!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Denatured alcohol is not usually poisoned so that you would just die if you drank it, nowadays. the point of the poisoning is to make it so foul that you _can't_ drink it. it's still possible to drink it and there's 100+ urban legends about how to remove the denaturing agents, ranging from filtering through bread to letting it drip over a sub zero piece of metal(I didn't ever deliberately go even looking for this info, but it's just Finnish street culture, also the notion that the ethanol itself would be somehow transformed in the denaturation process is deeply rooted into finnish street lore, even though that is a myth).
as such, denaturing with methanol is a stupid idea. might just as well but a methanol label on the bottle then. it's also easier to distill.. as such it's a pretty bad practice to sell a product without specifying what's in it though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you let someone know something is poisonous and try to stop them from drinking it, how can you possibly be responsible for them drinking it and dying?
Gee, maybe because you poisoned in the first place specifically so that your warning not to drink it because you'll die would be true. What exactly do you think happens to you if you mine your lawn and put up warning signs saying "minefield, you will die if you walk here" when neighborhood kids get blown to little pieces?
What is currently done with rubbing alcohol is pretty stupid and dangerous as far as I'm concerned, but it isn't a patch on the extremes they went to during Prohibition.
They did release the information that they poisoned it, but they kept the actual nature of the poisoning as secret as they could. Also, the intention was that customers of bootleggers, who didn't necessarily know where the alcohol came from would die and that all the blame would fall on the bootleggers.
Misrepresentation.
Lawns are for walking on, in that it is reasonable to expect to be able to walk on grass and get at most yelled at by some guy in a rocking chair on his porch.
Cleaning alcohol is exactly that, for cleaning not drinking. It says so right on the bottle. Have you really thought through what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol was not denatured, and the price left unchanged? I'm not sure that you have.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Misrepresentation.
Sorry, lost me there. Are you saying that _I_ am misrepresenting something, or was that one word your response to the question I asked at the end of my post?
Lawns are for walking on, in that it is reasonable to expect to be able to walk on grass and get at most yelled at by some guy in a rocking chair on his porch.
I personally feel that lawns are, in fact, for walking on. There are a surprisingly large number of people out there who feel that lawns are for fertilizing, landscaping, and mowing fanatically (not just theirs, but the lawn of anyone nearby, even people who like long grass) and _not_ for walking on or marring in any way. There are also plenty of people who feel that _their_ lawn is only for _them_ to walk on and no-one else. If a leaf blows onto their lawn from next door, they will attempt to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Sometimes, in real life and not just in hypothetical examples, these people do booby-trap their lawns. Sometimes they put up a warning sign about it, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the booby trap is just a dangerous dog. When people get hurt by these booby traps or vicious dogs, the people who set the traps usually go to jail. The people walking on their lawn in many cases are kids who knew they weren't supposed to be there, but were ignoring the warnings and breaking the rules (and possibly the law), but the law as well as basic principles of justice, recognize that such infractions do not deserve maiming or death as punishment, and certainly not handed out arbitrarily by a vengeful property owner rather than a neutral authority.
Cleaning alcohol is exactly that, for cleaning not drinking. It says so right on the bottle. Have you really thought through what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol was not denatured, and the price left unchanged? I'm not sure that you have.
Alcohol is used for a lot more things than just cleaning. As for what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol were not denatured and the price were unchanged... I suppose more people would drink it... and the people who drink it already wouldn't get so sick and die as much? If you're positing that people would get drunk vastly more, I don't see how. Most people who want to get drunk seem to find a way to get drunk. As it stands, if you walk into any liquor store, there's a staggering array of products available and many of them are significantly more expensive than the absolute cheapest high-alcohol content liquor you can find, but they seem to sell anyway. I think most people who want vodka are still going to buy vodka in a fancy bottle even if the vodka in the plastic bottle labelled "rubbing alcohol" in the pharmacy section at wal~mart is cheaper. In the big picture, it seems that it would simply reduce cases of poisoning and reduce tax revenues slightly from people who, for the most part, are desperately poor anyway.