Tag Archives | Hacking

Anonymous Hacks U.S. Department of Justice

By on May 23, 2012 in News 23

AnonAlex Fitzpatrick writes on Mashable:

Anonymous is taking credit for a confirmed breach of security at the U.S. Department of Justice, although the exact contents of the data bounty are not yet known.

“Today we are releasing 1.7 GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” reads an Anonymous press release, referring to the Department of Justice. “Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump.”

The hacktivist collective has been known to make bold claims, but a Department of Justice spokeswoman confirmed to Reuters that Anonymous members did indeed access a server that hosts the Department’s statistical data, including cybersecurity records…

… Read the rest

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Anonymous Claims Access to Every Secret Government Database

By on May 14, 2012 in News 23

AnonymousWrites Sam Biddle on Gizmodo:

Anonymous has been meek and quiet since the great Sabu treachery, failing to even threaten much of anything. But in a new interview, one of the group’s last remaining leaders says Anon has a nuclear card up its sleeve.

Christopher “Commander X” Doyon, whose name is public because he’s been busted for hacking a California government website, sat for an interview with the National Post. The exchange circles mostly around Doyon’s exile in Canada, where he’s hoping to dodge the wrath of American feds. But he ends on one particularly ominous and/or laughable note:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?

A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

… Read the rest

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How Germany’s Pirate Party is Hacking Politics (With Liquid Feedback)

By on May 6, 2012 in News 6

Piraten ParteiWould be great if this caught on in the United States. As David Meyer writes on GigaOM:

In the furores over SOPA, CISPA and similar bills, many have suggested that politicians just don’t get technology. That’s not an accusation that can be leveled at the Pirate movement, which is gaining traction in Europe at impressive speed.

The Pirates saw their first major electoral success in the European elections of 2009, when voters in the movement’s birthplace of Sweden returned a Pirate to the European Parliament. The Swedes didn’t vote the Pirates into their own legislature, mind you, but now big wins are coming in Germany, the continent’s largest economy and the ideological home of the hacker movement.

Why Germany? Because that’s what the Pirates are trying to do: hack politics, in the sense of making-and-tweaking-stuff sense, rather than destroying it. The movement may have begun with a narrow focus on intellectual property, but it has developed into an attempt to make the political process transparent — and of course better suited to the digital age.

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FBI Escalates War On Anonymous

By on April 27, 2012 in News 5

Here’s what happens when you proclaim yourself to be the representative of the Anonymous meme. Buzzfeed reports:

Last month, the FBI raided the Dallas home of Barrett Brown, the journalist and unofficial spokesperson for the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous. The Feds seized Brown’s computer and cellphone, searched his parent’s home as well, and demanded his Twitter records, chat logs, IRC conversations, Pastebin info, [and] all his Internet browsing activity. The warrant suggests the government is primarily after information related to Anonymous and the hacking group Lulzec.

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… Read the rest

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Anonymous Starts Social Music Platform: Anontune

By on April 25, 2012 in News 3

AnontuneAngela Watercutter writes on WIRED:

In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet.

The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them — while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits.

Reached by e-mail, one of the creators of Anontune told Wired the project was started by a group of anons who met online six years ago on what was then an underground hacking site. The group, mostly focused at the time on “cracking,” began discussing music, favorite artists and what they would do to fix current music business models…

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FBI: “We’re Not Winning” Against Hackers

By on March 31, 2012 in News 7

FBIDevlin Barrett reports in the Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber cop offered a grim appraisal of the nation’s efforts to keep computer hackers from plundering corporate data networks: “We’re not winning,” he said.

Shawn Henry, who is preparing to leave the FBI after more than two decades with the bureau, said in an interview that the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is “unsustainable.” Computer criminals are simply too talented and defensive measures too weak to stop them, he said.

His comments weren’t directed at specific legislation but came as Congress considers two competing measures designed to buttress the networks for critical U.S. infrastructure, such as electrical-power plants and nuclear reactors. Though few cybersecurity experts disagree on the need for security improvements, business advocates have argued that the new regulations called for in one of the bills aren’t likely to better protect computer networks …

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A Tree Falls In The Forest …

By on March 12, 2012 in News 19
Sabu Masked

Sabu Masked

To paraphrase the old Buddhist koan, “When Sabu shoots himself in the head, alone in the desert, will anyone care?”  What, for that matter, about the copper who turned him?

By now every one’s read at an account of how an influential member of the hacktivest collective Lulzsec was co-opted by American “law enforcement” to incite his fellow members into incriminating behavior for which they may now spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars.

Some of these stories have focused on local interest of individual participants in the drama.  Others have investigated the nature of hacker culture.  Still others on the legal problems presented by the apparently classic “entrapment” strategy used by the FBI.  But to date I have yet to see one discuss at any length the operation here of the deeper psycho/social dynamic that underlies the the self-concept of both Lulzsec and police forces.

This seems very odd to me, almost as if there were a deliberate conspiracy of stupidity to ignore the single most salient point of the whole affair.  Then again, my particular family history could be expected to make me preternaturally sensitive to issues of communal solidarity and order.… Read the rest

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‘We Are Legion’ Explains Anonymous

By on March 12, 2012 in News 44

“Anonymous kind of was like the strong, buff kid who had low self esteem and then all of a sudden punched somebody in the face and was like, ‘Holy Shit, I’m really strong!’”

This was just one great quote from We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, which premiered last night at Austin’s South By South West festival in a jammed Vimeo Theater.

Brian Knappenberger’s documentary is a revealing look at the culture of 4Chan and Anonymous, showing the world just how much power this loose but large group really has. In addition to Knappenberger, Internet activist and sometime Anon Gregg Housh led a fascinating Q&A session following the movie, demonstrating how the filmmakers have been able to gain the trust of, and therefore access to, many of the individuals who “are” Anonymous. This movie is going to be huge and I’m hoping to see it released generally soon. Until then, here’s the trailer:

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Human Demonology: LulzSec and the Betrayal of Sabu

By on March 9, 2012 in News 2

SabuP. Emerson Williams writes on Modern Mythology:

LulzSec are the Daily Mail readers’ wet dream and were probably dreamt up and promoted by like/right-minded journalists in the service of the Stazi State. —The Guardian Comment 29 June 2011 6:09AM

Last year was marked by a seeming endless thread of DDOS attacks and new video declarations, tying in or not, intersecting or not with boots on the ground protesting across the cities of the West. Common wisdom among anti-authoritarian types was that the establishment was too big and lumbering to ever catch up with or even understand any of this. (Also see: the “piracy” issue.) Large financial institutions, big media and government looked form the outside to be playing whack-a-mole, running defense against the actions of Anonymous and Wikileaks.

Recent acts of Anonymous, or more specifically Lulzsec include the interception and release of an FBI conference call, and a dump of five million emails exchanged between emplyees of intelligence firm Stratfor, the publication of which by WikiLeaks made headlines.

… Read the rest

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