WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

www.guardian.co.uk

It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

(visit the link for the full news article)

This, to me, is one of the most interesting things developing out of this whole event.

It has sort of taken on a whole other life of its own, and appears to be escalating.

I have recently reported about hackers re-establishing Limewire, after the gov took them down, as well as other hackers creating torrent sites outside of the gov's tenticles, on foreign based servers.

What if this takes on a whole other dynamic? Like the creation of another type of mainframe system altogether, ran by these folks who are rebelling?

I would have thought such a thing to be impossible, or the stuff of science fiction not long ago...

I'm not so sure anymore. Heh-heh

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

the problem I see with a cyber war
is that nobody can actually determine who
the real enemy is.

Originally posted by boondock-saint
the problem I see with a cyber war
is that nobody can actually determine who
the real enemy is.

But that's already true now Boon..
People have always been split on who are the bad guys..
Nothing new...

PRESS RELEASE - 2600 MAGAZINE CONDEMNS DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACKS
Posted 10 Dec 2010 04:45:38 UTC

PRESS RELEASE

HACKER MAGAZINE CONDEMNS DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACKS

New York, NY, December 10, 2010 - 2600 Magazine, a quarterly journal for the hacker community that has published since 1984, is speaking out against numerous media reports that hackers are responsible for a spate of attacks on numerous e-commerce corporations as part of the ongoing Wikileaks controversy.

Denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other corporations and entities have been underway for the last few days, as widely reported in the mainstream media. Each of these targets had previously taken some sort of action against the whistleblower website __._ and its affiliates. The media reports almost invariably refer to "hackers" as being behind these actions. While there is great sympathy in the hacker world for what Wikileaks is doing, this type of activity is no better than the strong-arm tactics we are fighting against.

www.2600.com...

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Methodology and Tactics
As you may know I normally target Jihadist sites, but recently turned my attentions to Wikileaks.

So what was I thinking?

Initially, hitting Wikileaks servers hosted by OWNI (France), PRQ (Sweden), and BAHNHOF with ease, had the desired outcome of ‘coralling’ the Wikileaks operation onto a US hosted platform that could resist XerXeS – Amazon EC2.

The WL perceived victory was short-lived as enough pressure was now building both politically and technically (by that I mean service providers were aware that WL was now a prime target and couldn’t risk their own operations by providing services to WL).

th3j35t3r.wordpress.com...

Originally posted by boondock-saint
the problem I see with a cyber war
is that nobody can actually determine who
the real enemy is.

Are both sides in any war not enemies?

Who is right in any war? Sure, some people are bad, but we punish by killing the good to get to the bad?

War is a weird concept and really is part of our primitive instincts, time to grow up and realize that because someone has bigger muscles does not make them better.

Pred...

Originally posted by boondock-saint
the problem I see with a cyber war
is that nobody can actually determine who
the real enemy is.

Kind of like the war on terror eh?

Or perhaps the war on drugs...
Or maybe the war on poverty, in which the enemy was originally poverty, but it is now the poor.

as long as assange doesn't use windows i'll give him the odds on favorite to win this cyberwar.

Yay!

Not only will Wikileaks lead us into a war with Iran, they'll take our internet away too!

Wow, lucky for the powers that be that Wikileaks came along at such a crucial time eh???

reply to post by Jeanius


Or maybe we'll end up with our very own, brand new, badass internet where we can get any information we want without being spyed on and messed with.

reply to post by Jeanius

Wikileaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.

The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.

These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.

Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

wikileaks.ch...

reply to post by devildogUSMC


That was what people were working towards.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets.

I take offense to the concept Wikileaks has put a thorn in the side of any western democracy. Surely it has put a thorn in the side of the US Federal Government because it has trouble telling lies now and covering up its crimes against humanity. The article should actually read: "A thorn in the side of the US Federal Government but a sliver of hope for the currently non-existent idea of a western democracy."

IDG News Service — The activists behind Operation Payback have come up with a new way to annoy corporations that have severed their ties with WikiLeaks: bombard them with faxes.

In online chats, group members have posted the fax numbers for about a half-dozen corporations and are calling volunteers to fill up the fax machines, using free online fax services such as MyFax.com and FaxZero.com. They're recommending that people use anonymizing software such as the Tor Project to access these sites, so that they cannot be traced by authorities.

www.cio.com...

The Internet Goes to War
by Craig Labovitz

If you weren’t paying attention recently, the Internet has gone to war.

ABC News proclaimed “Welcome to Infowar, Version 1.0″. Fox warned of the “growing data war”. And the Guardian provided minute by minute coverage on the opening salvos of this first “Internet-wide Cyber War”.

Of course, all of the above headlines refer to the rash of DDoS attacks both against the Wikileaks web site and the retaliatory strikes against hosting and commercial institutions that severed ties with the organization.

asert.arbornetworks.com...

War?

Nah...only democracy at work.

We are only humans, and no human would want themselves or their loved ones to live under the yoke of authoritarian slavery.

As the authoritarian elites decide amongst themselves how their slaves should live, to spy, to subjugate them, so too will humans strike back in similiar ways to hold them accountable for their actions.

True checks and balances, stuff of democracy, unlike the charades play out by rubber stamping parliaments and congress of supposed 'democratic' nations of the world.

Mankind strikes back.

reply to post by SeekerofTruth101


the media need to use the word "war" it brings in more page views.

The majority of attack traffic against the five retailers initiated from distributed IP addresses out of Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, and Brazil and reached peaks of up to 14 Gbps, with some websites experiencing up to 10,000 times above normal daily traffic.

www.akamai.com...

Interesting.

The hacktivist who goes by the handle “th3j35t3r” has been carrying out denial of service (DoS) attacks against suspected jihadist websites since he showed up on the hacktavism scene on January 1, 2010. He uses a DoS tool called XerXes that he claims to be the sole author of.

h3r0d07u5.wordpress.com...

> As many of you know, both Trend Micro and Spamhaus have published
> warnings about a Wikileaks mirror site 'wikileaks.info' which is
> run by the person or persons behind 'AnonOps' from an IP address of
> a Russian dedicated cybercrime host (Heihachi) on which there is
> nothing but malware and other cybercrime. Innocent people seeking to
> read or download Wikileaks documents are being directed to the rogue
> wikileaks.info server and into the hands of the crime gangs located
> there.
>
> For trying to warn about the crime gangs located at the
> wikileaks.info mirror IP, Spamhaus is now under ddos by AnonOps. The
> criminals there do not like our free speech at all.

cryptome.org...

another fail by anon

Update to above post

Update 19 December

After analyzing the traffic patters of the attempted DDoS attack against Spamhaus that started yesterday, we have concluded that the attack did not come from LOIC or another *OIC tool issued to script kiddies so that they can DDoS "enemies of Anon". The attack against us consists of UDP and Syn flood packets, which are not the profile of the *OIC tools. In addition, in some semi-private forums AnonOps members have denied responsibility for the DDoS. They have stated how much they hate spam and would not attack Spamhaus. It would seem some actually read and understood what our warning message was about. Rumors are that they have also distanced themselves from members who were promoting the use of botnets to attack sites.

It now appears far more likely that the DDoS was the work of people running, or hosting at, the Heihachi cybercrime group. Possibly they were angered by the attention this article brought to their dirty section of the internet. When one hosts malware, Zeus/SpyEye and other botnet command and control (C&C) servers, phish sites and "backends", child pornography sites, and other types of abusive web sites, avoiding attention is a must. Perhaps Russian authorities will now take a closer look at this Heihachi and its host Webalta, as Russian citizens and banks are often the target of the abusive activities hosted there.

As usual when we come under a DDoS, Spamhaus is working with both network experts and law-enforcement agencies to find and shut down the botnet used for the DDoS, and to try and track who may be behind it.

www.spamhaus.org...

So I decided to dive right in to the LOIC code and GEBUS CRISTI it is simple. I completely dismantled it and re-wrote the damn thing to actually work. Better yet… my version takes a list of proxies (Outside the USA) and each request goes through a random proxy host.

anonymousdown.wordpress.com...