Anonymous is Awesome!
January 23rd, 2012
How cool of a name is the “Low Orbit Ion Canon” for a hacker weapon? The name apparently comes from the strategy video game Command & Conquer, but now the hacker collective Anonymous has used the hacker version to take down the websites of the Department of Justice, the FBI, The US Copyright Office, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a half dozen other organizations that support the current intellectual property regime.
Last Wednesday the Internet exploded in protest over the proposed bills the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress, The Daily Paul and even our own Silver Underground went dark in protest of the bills. Well it seems we got somebody’s attention because a day later the Department of Justice felt the need to make a show of their copyright enforcement power even without SOPA or PIPA. They shut down the popular file-sharing site MegaUpload, arrested the seven owners in the raid and charged them with copyright infringement and money laundering. They are now being detained in New Zealand awaiting extradition to the US.
Within minutes Anonymous retaliated by launching what they’re calling their largest attack ever, with over 5,000 participating computers running the distributed denial-of-service attack. Part of what made this attack so successful was that they used a relatively new strategy. Your typical DoS attack utilizes what’s called a “zombie army” or “botnet.” Basically a large number of computers are coordinated to take synchronized action without their owners being aware of it. This requires infecting enough “zombie” or “bot” computers with some kind of virus or malware, which takes time and typically can’t command the force needed to drop a site like the FBI.
This time Anonymous crafted a website that invites regular everyday web surfers to “Join the Hive!” Then they spread the link all over Twitter, Facebook, IRC rooms and every other dark little corner of the internet they had access to. Those who clicked the link were taken to a page that temporarily hijacked their browser and used it to hammer the target sites. This website-based approach proved to be a much faster and stronger attack strategy, which means the enemies of Anonymous who thought they’d upped their bandwidth enough to deal with the typical DoS attacks have been put on notice. They crashed the websites of ten organizations in all, and released the personal information of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd.
I’ve really only got one comment to make. Given the overwhelming amount of public outrage over SOPA and PIPA, and the complete disregard for public opinion exhibited by the government, who do you think better exemplifies the Will of the People: The Department of Justice, or Anonymous?
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