I speculate thats what they'd do as well. If it were a real dox it wouldn't be released to the general public in this fashion for one. Second they probably wouldn't all be Americans. In fact I'd have expected them to be spread out, if they are all in one place they'll be easily stopped.
And the reason is the same technology they've learned to defeat will be the technology to put them under surveillance.
And technology, especially surveillance, is becoming so much more sophisticated that it's only a matter of time before there will be no activity that you can hide from the feds. At some point, whether by informant, by surveillance technology, or by persecution (as NATO said), they'll be stopped.
And the reason is, their strategy of pissing off the one group that can stop them this early in, is about the dumbest possible strategy and it doesnt matter if its chess or checkers. You don't go after the queen in the first few moves and expose yourself to checkmate but thats basically what they are doing. So all the government has to do is use their best minds, best programmers, and throw billions at it, or if the government wont do it Sony and a group of gaming corporations could decide to pool together 100 million dollars and stop them that way.
Any vigilante could potentially do good things but would you really trust random individuals (as egotistical and immature they may be) going around making justice by their own hands?
You can't trust the government either unfortunately.
And there aren't very many of them. They are vulnerable in many ways. First they are physically vulnerable. They don't understand that some types of surveillance technologies can see through walls, through their clothes etc. They don't understand that hiding isn't really an option and that using something like Tor is like wearing a hook in the Klan. Sure this would protect you from angry minorities, but it will not protect you from the FBI. Just look at how the FBI took down the Klan.
Finally, for whatever reason the government isn't using it's military assets. It's using it's law enforcement mechanism. This is why they are still allowed to do what they are doing. If the not so law abiding organizations in government get involved in this, that changes the game entirely for these hackers because torture, murder, extortion, basically the whole range of criminal activity could be used to stop whatever the national security threat is. And all of it would be completely off the record and who knows whether or not a black budget exists but if it does then the funding would be off the record also.
The government is allowing them to exist. I don't know why, maybe because the government is having a budget crisis and can't pass a budget or can't spend the money because Republicans don't want to pay for it. But the government has every single advantage, they have more brainpower, they have more money, they have more sophisticated technology, some of which the hackers don't even know exists and would have no way to detect or deal with.
The reason the technology isn't being used on them but was used on Bin Laden is because for whatever reason the government does not see them as a terrorist group or as a threat. Obama has the ability to simply give an order and they'd be captured probably in a matter of weeks.
If you look at what will happen, they are trying to create anarchy. Their goal is to create chaos. The problem is they don't understand half of the technology they are using.
Assuming some of them have some degree of skill to write code, they aren't on the level brainpower wise of the skill the government could recruit. The government will use it's money to get all the best brains, whether it be mathematics, programming, or social engineering. This will leave Anonymous and Lulz in a position to try to corrupt or double these people to work for them. And the only way they'll be able to do this would be through some sort of blackmail or coercion because that $500,000 they got from bitcoin simply wont be enough money. Now if they started getting millions from bitcoin, then you'd have a much more serious organization but still their weakness is they don't have the funding to compete with any government, not Israel, not the USA, not Iran, not China, and if they go up against any government or any sufficiently large ruthless corporation, millions if not billions of dollars in bounties will reign in upon them, and thousands of mercenaries will target them to collect those bounties.
And in the end, they'll all be either corrupted(doubled), arrested or exterminated depending on the nature of the organization they piss off. I feel bad for the innocent teenagers who get caught up in this mess thinking they are fighting for human rights or for some political reason, because I can understand why any teenager would be suckered into that. It's the same stuff the US military or any government would tell them. These kids will likely be radicalized into political soldiers, and then used as "useful idiots" for these groups. The US government will turn most of them into informants and arrest and torture the ones who are strong enough to put up any sort of fight (Bradley Manning?).
So from that perspective the best thing the US gov could do at this time would be among these options: 1. Unleash their A-team of cyber mercenaries 2. Form a cyber militia and draft the most skilled into it. 3. Unleash their high tech surveillance technologies. 4. Throw billions of dollars in bounties and in grants to develop the technology and start the arms race.
And Lulz, and Anonymous aren't going after the non-government influence that runs the government. Nobody really cares if they crash the CIA website except for perhaps the CIA and the tax payers. Ultimately this is not going to do anything to change political polices. And the people who are influencing political policies are doing it by going after policy makers, Senators and Congressmen who make policies by bribe, blackmail and general coercion. This is not something Anonymous or Lulz is smart enough to do which is why the policy makers will most likely use the law against them.
If Lulz and Anonymous were truly serious, and truly smart, they'd focus on getting their candidates into political power in the next election. They'd support Democrats and Republicans who support their agenda and who their organization has a degree of control over. And they'd become the cops, they'd join the feds. All they are doing right now is pissing the feds off, which will increase funding to stop them which will benefit white hats who are their smarter big brother counter parts, but not benefit their political agenda as the result could possibly be a major crackdown.
You know, if they were really smart they'd be part of a dirty tricks campaign. I could see politicians utilizing their services to research their competitor or to get elected. Once again, they are too confrontational, and in the end they wont accomplish much. I suppose if they manage to accomplish stuff overseas, such as lead a revolution or win a foreign election then we'd have to take them serious but as of right now they are just pissing the feds off who could crush them like ants literally. They have no idea the level of technology and brain power the feds have but for whatever strange reason have not unleashed on them.
The feds could probably pinpoint their locations despite that tor stuff, despite their proxies, and could probably unleash military and CIA assets on them, but as of right now it's just the FBI and DOJ. The NSA, CIA and US military for the most part has treated them as an annoying nuisance but has not unleashed their A-team.
And they better be glad the A-team has not been unleashed because from a skill standpoint they can't compare, and from a technological standpoint they can't compare.
Governments exist only for war. Governments fight wars to defend corporations.
Targeting government is always a distraction. If you have a mobster who is your rival and that mobster has some cops on his side, you don't target the cops, you target the mobster controlling those cops. Lulz security are on a suicide operation at this point. Any smart hacker white hat or black will want nothing to do with them or any other group that targets cops or feds. The mafia knows better than to target cops and feds, and so do most sophisticated criminal organizations or revolutionary movements. The only sort of idiots who target cops and feds are just that, complete idiots who don't mind the response and or who are trying to provoke one.
Targeting corporations on the other hand makes a bit more sense. Some corporations would pay hackers cash to target their rivals so there would be a great deal of money in it. And if this country really is corrupt, fascist, and controlled by evil corporations, it would make more sense to target corporations than the government itself that merely takes orders from the President on down potentially from corporations.
Lulz Security is not the organization to do any sort of internet revolution. Neither is Anonymous for that matter. But if some sort of revolution were happening, I doubt the target would be the CIA website, the US military and all those people. There are plenty of evil corporations that no one likes, that create products which kill people, that test trivial cosmetic products on defenseless animals,that abuse human rights, and I don't see Anonymous or Lulz going after them.
Instead they want to go after the cops? the CIA? the Military? The sort of people who probably deep down feel the same as they do and merely are doing their jobs and making money? Bad strategy. It's also a bad strategy to go after gamers personal information. Sure they could have done that to make a point, but releasing that and trying to hurt people with it is beyond any political point. That actually reduces support for their group.
All governments react and act the same. They'll do whatever they can get away with.
Which means if you piss off the US government you'll have accidents as well, except those accidents will look a lot more like bad luck than like radioactive substances found in your tea.
While it sounds good on paper, how would that ID scheme be implemented when credit card scanners aren't even available?
That internet ID bullcrap would only empower hackers more because now they'll literally be able to SWAT you and the courts will believe you did download all that child porn and hacked all those banks because it will be connected to your ID.
The internet ID idea is just plain stupid. A smarter idea would be to simply pay Microsoft and Apple to force them to put backdoors into their software and simply have a classified database keep track of each identity on each computer without the user having to even know it happens.
Right now the FBI could already have a computer identity database.
If you don't like Lulz security hire some hackers to stop them. Actually spend the money to secure your data and your network. Most of these hackers weren't from zero-day exploits that no one knew about, but even if they were they shouldnt have been this effective.
There have been compromised paypal accounts due to people using the same passwords between sites, so there has been real monetary damages to some people.
Perhaps they should use a better password. The fact is, most of us couldn't have a job if lulz security did not exist.
Who cares WHO or WHAT lulz security is? They are on a crime spree, and it most likely will result in an arms race which will be good for black and whitehats. At the same time it needs to happen for the same reason the browser wars had to happen. Innovation will come from this and it's already starting.
Most hackers work in information security. If they were former hackers or current, blackhat or whitehat, there isn't a lot of difference besides that one group gets paid over the table and follows the law while the other gets paid by the black market or not at all and does not follow laws.
Like Yin and Yang they both co-exist to the benefit of each other.
In my opinion their code itself needs to be audited. It's very possible the security flaw is in bitcoin itself.
Who are the developers? What are their names? Why isn't the source code posted up on pastebin or presented in a way where the cloud or crowd can grok and audit it? The Linux Kernel is easy to find. Even TrueCrypt's code can be found.
Look I don't even need to have to see the goddamn code. Show us the pseudo-code displaying the core algorithms. I just need to know there are no errors or bugs in this code and who is writing it.
Discs aren't fast anymore. Solid state drives/cartridges are cheap now, and much much faster.
Err no. Solid state disk are not cheap when it come to comparing against a 25 GB or even 50 GB BD disk. Go and price a 16 GB flash rom against a 25 GB BD disk there is a huge difference in price. Even if you compare a solid state disk drive against a conventional disk drive the conventional drive wins in all factors (especially price per GB) except performance and in the case of a gaming machine is not that important.
By the time Wii U is released that wont be the case anymore.
I'm reading that some how the money was given to them via a donation, at least thats what is being hinted at on the forums.
Whether or not he sent it to them himself and wants to deny it, or if he was hacked and they stole it, if they have it then it's safe to say it's lost forever.
Given that the attacker, unless a total putz, probably covered his tracks at least reasonably well, and given that the victim is nobody in particular, I also would be surprised to see much effort put into the case.
That said, while I doubt that the feds have much interest in bitcoins qua currency, it is hardly the case that "hackers stealing data that possess value based more or less on people's belief that they do" isn't something you can interest the feds in. It would be a fun test case, for instance, to see if bitcoin secret keys could qualify as "Trade Secrets", in which case stealing them would be fairly serious business, state and federal.
When you are talking $500,000 the hackers could be anybody. They could be people with the kind of knowledge to pull any hack off.
And allow the bit coin users to access them from the cloud to make transactions. Have the bit coin users generate their own keypair to protect their wallet, and have them protect that themselves as the entire security of their bitcoins will be determined by how they protect it. Generally speaking if they can't follow best practices it's their own fault.+
He was an early adopter. When bitcoin value exploded what was little more than $20 worth of digital money exploded to $500,000. Effectively, he was exactly the type of person many expressed concerns about bring the real people who would benefit from bitcoins.
not a hoax, an oax. Meaning some idiot made it up to pull down the value of Bitcoin.
Nobody could be stupid enough to not protect the dat file or where ever $500,000 is stored. You ought to protect your file as you'd protect your money.
Slashdot Mirror
I speculate thats what they'd do as well. If it were a real dox it wouldn't be released to the general public in this fashion for one. Second they probably wouldn't all be Americans. In fact I'd have expected them to be spread out, if they are all in one place they'll be easily stopped.
And the reason is the same technology they've learned to defeat will be the technology to put them under surveillance.
And technology, especially surveillance, is becoming so much more sophisticated that it's only a matter of time before there will be no activity that you can hide from the feds. At some point, whether by informant, by surveillance technology, or by persecution (as NATO said), they'll be stopped.
And the reason is, their strategy of pissing off the one group that can stop them this early in, is about the dumbest possible strategy and it doesnt matter if its chess or checkers. You don't go after the queen in the first few moves and expose yourself to checkmate but thats basically what they are doing. So all the government has to do is use their best minds, best programmers, and throw billions at it, or if the government wont do it Sony and a group of gaming corporations could decide to pool together 100 million dollars and stop them that way.
Any vigilante could potentially do good things but would you really trust random individuals (as egotistical and immature they may be) going around making justice by their own hands?
You can't trust the government either unfortunately.
And there aren't very many of them. They are vulnerable in many ways. First they are physically vulnerable. They don't understand that some types of surveillance technologies can see through walls, through their clothes etc. They don't understand that hiding isn't really an option and that using something like Tor is like wearing a hook in the Klan. Sure this would protect you from angry minorities, but it will not protect you from the FBI. Just look at how the FBI took down the Klan.
Finally, for whatever reason the government isn't using it's military assets. It's using it's law enforcement mechanism. This is why they are still allowed to do what they are doing. If the not so law abiding organizations in government get involved in this, that changes the game entirely for these hackers because torture, murder, extortion, basically the whole range of criminal activity could be used to stop whatever the national security threat is. And all of it would be completely off the record and who knows whether or not a black budget exists but if it does then the funding would be off the record also.
They know how to hide behind the script kiddies.
The government is allowing them to exist. I don't know why, maybe because the government is having a budget crisis and can't pass a budget or can't spend the money because Republicans don't want to pay for it. But the government has every single advantage, they have more brainpower, they have more money, they have more sophisticated technology, some of which the hackers don't even know exists and would have no way to detect or deal with.
The reason the technology isn't being used on them but was used on Bin Laden is because for whatever reason the government does not see them as a terrorist group or as a threat. Obama has the ability to simply give an order and they'd be captured probably in a matter of weeks.
If you look at what will happen, they are trying to create anarchy. Their goal is to create chaos. The problem is they don't understand half of the technology they are using.
Assuming some of them have some degree of skill to write code, they aren't on the level brainpower wise of the skill the government could recruit. The government will use it's money to get all the best brains, whether it be mathematics, programming, or social engineering. This will leave Anonymous and Lulz in a position to try to corrupt or double these people to work for them. And the only way they'll be able to do this would be through some sort of blackmail or coercion because that $500,000 they got from bitcoin simply wont be enough money. Now if they started getting millions from bitcoin, then you'd have a much more serious organization but still their weakness is they don't have the funding to compete with any government, not Israel, not the USA, not Iran, not China, and if they go up against any government or any sufficiently large ruthless corporation, millions if not billions of dollars in bounties will reign in upon them, and thousands of mercenaries will target them to collect those bounties.
And in the end, they'll all be either corrupted(doubled), arrested or exterminated depending on the nature of the organization they piss off. I feel bad for the innocent teenagers who get caught up in this mess thinking they are fighting for human rights or for some political reason, because I can understand why any teenager would be suckered into that. It's the same stuff the US military or any government would tell them. These kids will likely be radicalized into political soldiers, and then used as "useful idiots" for these groups. The US government will turn most of them into informants and arrest and torture the ones who are strong enough to put up any sort of fight (Bradley Manning?).
So from that perspective the best thing the US gov could do at this time would be among these options: 1. Unleash their A-team of cyber mercenaries 2. Form a cyber militia and draft the most skilled into it. 3. Unleash their high tech surveillance technologies. 4. Throw billions of dollars in bounties and in grants to develop the technology and start the arms race.
And Lulz, and Anonymous aren't going after the non-government influence that runs the government. Nobody really cares if they crash the CIA website except for perhaps the CIA and the tax payers. Ultimately this is not going to do anything to change political polices. And the people who are influencing political policies are doing it by going after policy makers, Senators and Congressmen who make policies by bribe, blackmail and general coercion. This is not something Anonymous or Lulz is smart enough to do which is why the policy makers will most likely use the law against them.
If Lulz and Anonymous were truly serious, and truly smart, they'd focus on getting their candidates into political power in the next election. They'd support Democrats and Republicans who support their agenda and who their organization has a degree of control over. And they'd become the cops, they'd join the feds. All they are doing right now is pissing the feds off, which will increase funding to stop them which will benefit white hats who are their smarter big brother counter parts, but not benefit their political agenda as the result could possibly be a major crackdown.
You know, if they were really smart they'd be part of a dirty tricks campaign. I could see politicians utilizing their services to research their competitor or to get elected. Once again, they are too confrontational, and in the end they wont accomplish much. I suppose if they manage to accomplish stuff overseas, such as lead a revolution or win a foreign election then we'd have to take them serious but as of right now they are just pissing the feds off who could crush them like ants literally. They have no idea the level of technology and brain power the feds have but for whatever strange reason have not unleashed on them.
The feds could probably pinpoint their locations despite that tor stuff, despite their proxies, and could probably unleash military and CIA assets on them, but as of right now it's just the FBI and DOJ. The NSA, CIA and US military for the most part has treated them as an annoying nuisance but has not unleashed their A-team.
And they better be glad the A-team has not been unleashed because from a skill standpoint they can't compare, and from a technological standpoint they can't compare.
Governments exist only for war. Governments fight wars to defend corporations.
Targeting government is always a distraction. If you have a mobster who is your rival and that mobster has some cops on his side, you don't target the cops, you target the mobster controlling those cops. Lulz security are on a suicide operation at this point. Any smart hacker white hat or black will want nothing to do with them or any other group that targets cops or feds. The mafia knows better than to target cops and feds, and so do most sophisticated criminal organizations or revolutionary movements. The only sort of idiots who target cops and feds are just that, complete idiots who don't mind the response and or who are trying to provoke one.
Targeting corporations on the other hand makes a bit more sense. Some corporations would pay hackers cash to target their rivals so there would be a great deal of money in it. And if this country really is corrupt, fascist, and controlled by evil corporations, it would make more sense to target corporations than the government itself that merely takes orders from the President on down potentially from corporations.
Lulz Security is not the organization to do any sort of internet revolution. Neither is Anonymous for that matter. But if some sort of revolution were happening, I doubt the target would be the CIA website, the US military and all those people. There are plenty of evil corporations that no one likes, that create products which kill people, that test trivial cosmetic products on defenseless animals,that abuse human rights, and I don't see Anonymous or Lulz going after them.
Instead they want to go after the cops? the CIA? the Military? The sort of people who probably deep down feel the same as they do and merely are doing their jobs and making money? Bad strategy. It's also a bad strategy to go after gamers personal information. Sure they could have done that to make a point, but releasing that and trying to hurt people with it is beyond any political point. That actually reduces support for their group.
All governments react and act the same. They'll do whatever they can get away with.
Which means if you piss off the US government you'll have accidents as well, except those accidents will look a lot more like bad luck than like radioactive substances found in your tea.
While it sounds good on paper, how would that ID scheme be implemented when credit card scanners aren't even available?
That internet ID bullcrap would only empower hackers more because now they'll literally be able to SWAT you and the courts will believe you did download all that child porn and hacked all those banks because it will be connected to your ID.
The internet ID idea is just plain stupid. A smarter idea would be to simply pay Microsoft and Apple to force them to put backdoors into their software and simply have a classified database keep track of each identity on each computer without the user having to even know it happens.
Right now the FBI could already have a computer identity database.
If you don't like Lulz security hire some hackers to stop them. Actually spend the money to secure your data and your network. Most of these hackers weren't from zero-day exploits that no one knew about, but even if they were they shouldnt have been this effective.
There have been compromised paypal accounts due to people using the same passwords between sites, so there has been real monetary damages to some people.
Perhaps they should use a better password. The fact is, most of us couldn't have a job if lulz security did not exist.
Who cares WHO or WHAT lulz security is? They are on a crime spree, and it most likely will result in an arms race which will be good for black and whitehats.
At the same time it needs to happen for the same reason the browser wars had to happen. Innovation will come from this and it's already starting.
Most hackers work in information security. If they were former hackers or current, blackhat or whitehat, there isn't a lot of difference besides that one group gets paid over the table and follows the law while the other gets paid by the black market or not at all and does not follow laws.
Like Yin and Yang they both co-exist to the benefit of each other.
For population control purposes.
There is no reasonable reason why it's illegal in any state. Puritan rules are utterly stupid. Along with dumbass blue laws.
If there is one thing not to mess with as a teen, it's nuclelar tech.
Let the user select a location that is not standard.
In my opinion their code itself needs to be audited. It's very possible the security flaw is in bitcoin itself.
Who are the developers? What are their names? Why isn't the source code posted up on pastebin or presented in a way where the cloud or crowd can grok and audit it? The Linux Kernel is easy to find. Even TrueCrypt's code can be found.
Look I don't even need to have to see the goddamn code. Show us the pseudo-code displaying the core algorithms. I just need to know there are no errors or bugs in this code and who is writing it.
Discs aren't fast anymore. Solid state drives/cartridges are cheap now, and much much faster.
Err no. Solid state disk are not cheap when it come to comparing against a 25 GB or even 50 GB BD disk. Go and price a 16 GB flash rom against a 25 GB BD disk there is a huge difference in price. Even if you compare a solid state disk drive against a conventional disk drive the conventional drive wins in all factors (especially price per GB) except performance and in the case of a gaming machine is not that important.
By the time Wii U is released that wont be the case anymore.
Nobody could be stupid enough to...
Any sentence beginning this way is automatically incorrect.
Anybody couldn't be smart enough to withhold solecism and pedantry.
I'm reading that some how the money was given to them via a donation, at least thats what is being hinted at on the forums.
Whether or not he sent it to them himself and wants to deny it, or if he was hacked and they stole it, if they have it then it's safe to say it's lost forever.
Given that the attacker, unless a total putz, probably covered his tracks at least reasonably well, and given that the victim is nobody in particular, I also would be surprised to see much effort put into the case.
That said, while I doubt that the feds have much interest in bitcoins qua currency, it is hardly the case that "hackers stealing data that possess value based more or less on people's belief that they do" isn't something you can interest the feds in. It would be a fun test case, for instance, to see if bitcoin secret keys could qualify as "Trade Secrets", in which case stealing them would be fairly serious business, state and federal.
When you are talking $500,000 the hackers could be anybody. They could be people with the kind of knowledge to pull any hack off.
And allow the bit coin users to access them from the cloud to make transactions. Have the bit coin users generate their own keypair to protect their wallet, and have them protect that themselves as the entire security of their bitcoins will be determined by how they protect it. Generally speaking if they can't follow best practices it's their own fault.+
He was an early adopter. When bitcoin value exploded what was little more than $20 worth of digital money exploded to $500,000. Effectively, he was exactly the type of person many expressed concerns about bring the real people who would benefit from bitcoins.
He made $500,000 off Bitcoin? I'm skeptical.
not a hoax, an oax. Meaning some idiot made it up to pull down the value of Bitcoin.
Nobody could be stupid enough to not protect the dat file or where ever $500,000 is stored. You ought to protect your file as you'd protect your money.