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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."

11 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Jokes on them! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anonymous members don't have bank accounts.

  2. what could go wrong? by lostsoulz · · Score: 5, Funny

    Installing software that allows a third party to orchestrate DDoS? Sounds legit...

    1. Re:what could go wrong? by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "My banking information was compromised, and all I wanted to do was help take down the website of some entity that displeased me today" isn't really a rallying cry many people can get behind.

      Well, no. It's too long.
      "Tits, for great justice!" is shorter.

      Who said that a battle cry has to reflect all your causes? I don't see US marines crying "to protect the dollar being usurped as de facto currency for international oil trade" either. Instead they go with a slogan they don't know what means, don't know how to pronounce, but is short and goes well with beer.

    2. Re:what could go wrong? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What about running it in a sandbox? It's not like a DDOS tool needs to access your files, is it?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  3. Re:Not hackers? Shocking! by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Further proof the bulk of "anonymous" are just brainless sheep on image boards.

    Sheep? Yeah, most of them are. Much like anything popular, what you're mainly going to attract are sheep.

    Brainless? Some, sure. I saw one that had decorated her Guy Fawkes mask "to make it prettier". Um. Yeah, brainless. But I think you'll find some smart ones too, if you look hard.

    Image boards? Nothing in TFA points to that. It's easy to think of Anonymous as a bunch of 4channers, but that's not really true anymore, if it ever was. IRC and Twitter are probably more popular than image boards for those who go beyond just sniffing at Anon. Probably Facebook too for the more careless ones. But there's very little Anonymous on image boards these days.

  4. They don't need them by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The pocket money they get from mummy and daddy doesn't make it worth while.

  5. Re:Reminds me of prohibition by abigsmurf · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  6. FBI? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  7. Re:DDoS'ing is comparable to a mafia hit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Picket Brick'N'Mortar store or DDOS OnlineStore.com... what speech is being halted? Either can still speak out (Press releases, backup location/sites, etc). The price is business lost, customers frustrated that shop elsewhere, bad press, etc

    You CAN stifle speech via DDOS, but to say it's the ONLY reason for doing it? that's a bit short sighted to say the least. Ignoring the forest for the tree you've focused on.

  8. Re:It simply shows... by sociocapitalist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If I understood TFA correctly, the trojan was not distributed by Anonymous but by others who basically hijacked the distro, redirecting the wannabee DDOSers to another executable which contained the trojan.

    --
    blindly antisocialist = antisocial
  9. Re:Reminds me of prohibition by tragedy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.