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Britain's GCHQ Attacked Anonymous Supporters With DDoS
An anonymous reader writes "NBC News reports that, during a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group bragged about using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against members of Anonymous during an operation called Rolling Thunder in 2011 (there is evidence that says it was a SYN flood, so technically it was a simple DoS attack). Regular citizens would face 10 years in prison and enormous fines for committing a DoS / DDoS attack. The same applies if they encouraged or assisted in one. But if you work in the government, it seems like you're an exception to the rule."
...No, I got nothing.
In other news, the UK military can drive tanks, fire missiles & carry weapons - but regular citizens cannot.
It's all about oversight, not an attitude of "why can't we legally do this too?".
To the police that is? That government agents (no not only the 007 kind) tend to overstep their authorities and commit crimes from time to time isn't that uncommon or even strange (even a government consists of people after all) but the solution to that is to report the event to police and let the legal system handle it. And hope the guilty are punished, sadly that isn't certain...
http://pigs-at-gchq.com/ Do laws matter? When all agree to abide by a law it is called a social contract in English. “An agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for mutual social benefits, by safeguarding individual freedom for state protection.” The Oxford dictionary puts it this way: “Agreement among the members of a society or between a society and its rulers about the rights and duties of each.” The U.K. and the U.S. authorities have broken this agreement so badly in so many different ways that the future is not looking very good. Until they agree to keep within this social contract I will simply tell them at every opportunity to fuck off. Hope you do the same.
The police are not permitted to intentionally harrass or harm persons and property unless directly threatened.
The police are not permitted
False. What we are finding is that a badge and gun are all the permit needed.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
DDoS/DoS CAN be stopped (Microsoft & Amazon are setup PERFECTLY vs. it in fact, read on below on that note)!
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Microsoft Windows NT-based OS settings vs. DoS:
Protect Against SYN Attacks
FROM -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...
A SYN attack exploits a vulnerability in the TCP/IP connection establishment mechanism. To mount a SYN flood attack, an attacker uses a program to send a flood of TCP SYN requests to fill the pending connection queue on the server. This prevents other users from establishing network connections.
To protect the network against SYN attacks, follow these generalized steps, explained later in this document:
Enable SYN attack protection
Set SYN protection thresholds
Set additional protections
Enable SYN Attack Protection
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The named value to enable SYN attack protection is located beneath the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TcpIp\Parameters.
Value name: SynAttackProtect
Recommended value: 2
Valid values: 0, 1, 2
Description: Causes TCP to adjust retransmission of SYN-ACKS. When you configure this value the connection responses timeout more quickly in the event of a SYN attack. A SYN attack is triggered when the values of TcpMaxHalfOpen or TcpMaxHalfOpenRetried are exceeded.
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Set SYN Protection Thresholds
The following values determine the thresholds for which SYN protection is triggered. All of the keys and values in this section are under the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TcpIp\Parameters
These keys and values are:
Value name: TcpMaxPortsExhausted
Recommended value: 5
Valid values: 0?65535
Description: Specifies the threshold of TCP connection requests that must be exceeded before SYN flood protection is triggered.
Value name: TcpMaxHalfOpen
Recommended value data: 500
Valid values: 100?65535
Description: When SynAttackProtect is enabled, this value specifies the threshold of TCP connections in the SYN_RCVD state. When SynAttackProtect is exceeded, SYN flood protection is triggered.
Value name: TcpMaxHalfOpenRetried
Recommended value data: 400
Valid values: 80?65535
Description: When SynAttackProtect is enabled, this value specifies the threshold of TCP connections in the SYN_RCVD state for which at least one retransmission has been sent. When SynAttackProtect is exceeded, SYN flood protection is triggered.
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Set Additional Protections
All the keys and values in this section are located under the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TcpIp\Parameters. These keys and values are:
Value name: TcpMaxConnectResponseRetransmissions
Recommended value data: 2
Valid values: 0?255
Description: Controls how many times a SYN-ACK is retransmitted before canceling the attempt when responding to a SYN request.
Value name: TcpMaxDataRetransmissions
Recommended value data: 2
Valid values: 0?65535
Description: Specifies the number of times that TCP retransmits an individual data segment (not connection request segments) before aborting the connection.
Value name: EnablePMTUDiscovery
Recommended value data: 0
Valid values: 0, 1
Description: Setting this value to 1 (the default) forces TCP to discover the maximum transmission unit or largest packet size over the path to a remote host. An attacker can force packet fragmentation, which overworks the stack.
Specifying 0 forces the MTU of 576 bytes for connections from hosts not on the local subnet.
Value name: KeepAliveTime
Recommended value data: 300000
Valid values: 80?4294967295
Description: Specifies how often T
There is not 'exception to the rule' under UK law. You have to have some 'ok' from the gov to do this. The GCHQ staff understood that when they first collected all calls (domestic too) via their Intelsat efforts in the 1960's.
The Intelligence Services Act of 1994 offers a lot of new legal protections, then the Intelligence and Security Committee, SIGMod (sigint modernisation) followed in mid 2000 with more legal backing. Open court use of material is still under GCHQ veto, most is "passed" to other groups, MI5, ~ Special Branch.
The use of a "packet flood" back up would have been a new step beyond passive logging and longer term infiltrating efforts.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Fascism and the police state.
We all lose.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Wasn't just the Anonymous group the attacked ones, but other people that wanted to stay anonymous too, like political dissidents and others. Is not the War on Anonymous, but the war on anonymous, privacy and anonymity is becoming outlawed (except for them, of course)
The police are not permitted to intentionally harrass or harm persons and property unless directly threatened.
That depends if you define "permitted" there as "sanctioned" or as "allowed".
Indeed it can be argued - but there still needs to be a law saying they can. A law subject to democratic (well, ish) and judicial oversight, a law that everyone can see and argue over.
That's what she said, WOOOOOOOO
*: I did try and warn him about the future but he said he had to rush off to do some shopping..
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
It's illegal in most places for private citizens to lob military grade ordinance around, but not for Governments.
The police are not permitted
False. What we are finding is that a badge and gun are all the permit needed.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
If government agents lobbed military-grade ordinance at innocent civilians in the UK, we'd call that unlawful killing and lock the bastards up. And by the same token, if GCHQ had DoS'd targets belonging to legitimate wartime enemies, we wouldn't be criticizing them.
As a rough rule of thumb, the government isn't allowed to do things to citizens above and beyond what any civilian could do without a court mandate or a valid piece of legislation. Unless GCHQ have such a thing, they did wrong.