I am watching with true fascination the events unfolding before our eyes. Gone are the days where you would hear about the latest war events from your favorite TV channel. These days you can follow @operation_anon on twitter calling you to “battle”, battle being downloading LOIC from sourgeforce.net and botnet DDOS attacking Mastercard, Visa and the like.
Only a mere thousand of an alleged 260k cables being under the possesion of wikileaks has been released. So far so good, nothing too major – maybe only king Abdullah (of Saudi Arabia) asking the US to go on war with Iran. The spasmodic panic reactions from Governments and Corporations alike are quite worrying. As is the zeal with which Assange is being pursued by the swedish government over the rape case.
I keep reading moronic news reports from otherwise respectable news sources. I thought I should get some facts straight. Is damage being actually made to those giant corporations? What is likely to happen? Who are those “hacktivists”? What a stupid term. Hacktivists. Who is anonymous? How bad is mainstream media at reporting non-mainstream things?
No significant damage has been made to Visa and Mastercard. The websites will be back up once the attack is over. Their payments go ahead regardless of their websites being functional or not and I will stop this here because I do have the full knowledge to explain much more than that. The real damage is being done to their reputation. For every journalist reporting that Visa or Mastercard is under attack one non tech savvy person is going to assume that the security of their money is being compromised.
The other side effect of the Visa and Mastercard exploits is that more people are being recruited to the Operation Payback cause. What apparently started as a group of more or less 50 people, quite likely originating from the 4chan forums, a hive of “anonymous”, has now grown to a small army with possibly 4-5 thousand participants. I read that 5000 could take temporarily take down paypal. Is this number arbitrary? I do now know.
Paypal’s website is a much bigger fish than Visa and Mastercard’s websites. Taking it down – well technically the website won’t be taken down, it is just that the domain Paypal.com would not be resolving at the designated IP – would mean not just a loss of face but also a loss of operational capabilities- and a loss of significant money (3:23 UK time edit). I just checked again. Paypal seems to be down (4:10 UK time edit).
Who is Anonymous? Anonymous is a leaderless open entity consisting of individual users. It is not a closed group. It traces’ its origin back to messageboard 4chan. 4chan.org is the world’s largest imageboard. There are no user aliases there. All users are give the nickname Anonymous and a timestamp. 4chan and Anonymous are credited with some of the creepier things you have heard about the internet, (finding the buried body of a murdered girl before the police could have known where it was) are possibly the ones that gave birth or nurished almost everything that is indegenous to internet culture (for instance LOLCATS).
They have had some impressive exploits in the past, their most prolific moments being raging cyber war against the church of scientology hacking Sarah Palin’s account and manipulating the Time person of the year vote in Moot’s favor (Moot being the founder of 4chan) while also ordering all the initials to form out the words MARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME.
While the group might have originally formed its collective conciousness while lurking 4chan, it now clearly is much larger than that, as are its operational capabilities. Prank calling and sending pizzas to scientology offices is one thing, taking down the paypal website is another.
What happens next? If I had to guess I would say that the original enthusiasm would die down soon and almost everything would be back to normal soon after. Legislations would become much stricter and governments would be increasingly able to monitor individuals’ internet activities. But maybe I am just wrong.
Maybe this today will be remembered in popular press as the first cyber/internet war. We are all going to find out very soon
Links & References for those still hungry for knowledge (includes graphic content)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29
http://www.4chan.org
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddos#Distributed_attack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOIC
