Anonops #8: Occupy Wall Str.

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http://www.krapuul.nl/shr(...)ag-occupyeverything/

Wat drie weken geleden begon met een bezetting op Wall Street, is razendsnel aan het uitgroeien tot een nieuwe, zelfbewuste protestbeweging in de VS. In navolging van Egypte en Spanje verspreiden pleinprotesten zich razendsnel door Noord-Amerika en de rest van Europa, tegen de hebzucht en corruptie van de allermachtigsten en voor echte democratie. Volgende week zaterdag 15 oktober volgen ook Amsterdam en Den Haag.

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Threats from the Invisible Industry

In February, a team of Anonymous hackers revealed a massive conspiracy on the part of Bank of America, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Hunton & Williams law firm, and three intelligence contracting companies to harass, monitor, and discredit left-wing groups, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Wikileaks, and other targets. Beyond the plot itself, these revelations signaled a growing and dangerous dynamic whereby powerful institutions have sought to develop and implement the most comprehensive disinformation apparatus in history - one that, as in the past, will be pointed directly at those who seek a change in the status quo.

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This familiar tendency on the part of the US government to spend money it doesn't have on things it doesn't get is now directed at developing procedures it shouldn't use. The intelligence contracting industry, which includes firms that provide security applications to the entire US government and military, has been encouraged lately to direct more of its collective time and capabilities to the task of monitoring, misinforming and sometimes outright attacking American citizens and others abroad and benefit from the protection of the state and the incompetence of the media in order to make such attacks with impunity.

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Hackers kraken spionagesoftware Duitse regering

BERLIJN – De software die de Duitse regering inzet om computers af te luisteren blijkt slecht te zijn ontworpen en gaat verder dan de wet toestaat.

Dat stellen hackers van de Duitse hackersvereniging CCC, die de software in handen wisten te krijgen.

De programmatuur wordt door de Duitse regering op de computers van verdachten geladen en houden het volledige gedrag van de systemen in de gaten.

Zo wordt niet alleen de verbinding getapt, maar ook iedere handeling op de computer in de gaten gehouden. Ook in Nederland bestaat de juridische mogelijkheid dit type software in te zetten.

Gaten

De hackers analyseerden de software tot in detail en troffen veel fouten aan. Zo hoort informatie versleuteld naar een centraal punt te worden gestuurd. Ook kan de overheid opdrachten naar computers sturen. Nu blijkt de versleuteling wel te zijn geprogrammeerd, maar deze werkt niet. Alle informatie wordt dan ook leesbaar via internet verstuurd.

Een gevolg is dat andere mensen zonder autorisatie opdrachten naar de computers van geobserveerde personen kunnen sturen. Een ander gevolg is dat het mogelijk zou zijn voor CCC opdrachten te geven om de afluisterapparatuur te ontregelen. De hackers zeggen dat niet te hebben gedaan.

Wel is inmiddels een programma geschreven om de afgeluisterde computers te kunnen beheren als onderdeel van het onderzoek. Ook de software zelf hebben de hackers beschikbaar gemaakt.

Monitoren

Een ander probleem is dat de software meer blijkt te doen dan toegestaan. Zo is door het Duitse Federale Constitutionele Hof bepaald dat de software alleen telefoongesprekken via internet en andere communicatie mag monitoren.

In de praktijk blijkt nu veel meer te worden gemonitord. Ook bestanden kunnen bijvoorbeeld worden gelezen.

De software blijkt ook in staat te zijn veranderingen op computers door te voeren, bestanden te wijzigen of te verwijderen. Op afstand kan ook de camera, het toetsenbord en de microfoon worden aangesproken.

De hackers roepen de politiek nu op om in te grijpen. Zij willen dat deze vorm van spionage en afluisteren stopt.

A Message To Wall Street

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http://pastebin.com/dqZJJxQg

Greetings.

We are Anonymous.
We are acting on our own volition, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, to decry the injustice committed by the few, and against the many.

As such, we will be targeting the New York Stock Exchange on the 10 October 3:30pm EST to illustrate our rejection of this corrupted American institution.

We will have a digital sit-in. Participants can join in whatever capacity they decide is right for them. We do not endorse any specific method. Despite your method, however, we do endorse that you take security precautions that protect your IP address from being targeted.

NYSE, we are not fighting to damage you financially. We are fighting to show that we will stand up to you and the damage being inflicted upon the people of the world.

Be safe, be Anonymous. Any action you take against this beast could have serious repercussions.

A reminder: Slavery was once legal.

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not Forgive.
We do not Forget.
Expect us.

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Op maandag 10 oktober 2011 17:11 schreef Louis22 het volgende:
Ik snap dat uneducated-bezwaar van geen kant.

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Anonymous 'hacktivists' briefly take down NYSE.com

Anonymous' call for a massive attack on the New York Stock Exchange's website was met Monday -- but very, very briefly.

A group calling itself Anonymous, a name used by disparate groups of online "hactivists," threatened to take down NYSE.com at 3:30 p.m. ET today as an extension of the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations that have continued into a fourth week.

The website was slow and then unavailable from about 3:35 p.m. to around 3:37 p.m, after which it returned to normal. Keynote, a mobile and Internet monitoring company, confirmed that NYSE.com slowed down during that time. It also measured widespread disruptions to the site between 5:30 p.m. and 5:55 p.m.

Another tracking site, AlertSite, measured "a definite increase in response times from 3:45 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET." After that, the site returned to normal. Monitoring site downforeveryoneorjustme.com also registered a series of brief outages.

But Rich Adamonis, a spokesman from the NYSE, rebutted the monitoring sites' findings.

"We detected no service outage on our corporate website at that time," he said.

In a message that went out in early October through a video on YouTube, the group called for a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack, which directs a flood of traffic to a website and temporarily crashes it by overwhelming its servers. It doesn't actually involve any hacking or security breaches, and would have no effect on NYSE's stock-trading systems.

Adamonis confirmed that trading was not impacted.

DDoS is a tool that Anonymous has employed successfully before, taking down MasterCard.com and Visa.com for several hours on Dec. 8, 2010.

The YouTube video posted earlier calling for the NYSE.com attack proclaimed: "A new civil rights movement has begun. You now have an opportunity to make a difference. Join the protests. Organize your own. Watch online. Be a part of the movement."

Anonymous' attacks haven't always worked: It failed in an attempt to take down Amazon.com, which has extensive safeguards against sudden traffic spikes. The DDoS attacks have also led to the arrests of several participants.

At least a few people claiming to be part of Anonymous didn't think the attack on NYSE.com was a risk worth taking. One site used to coordinate Anonymous operations, AnonNews.org, posted a statement saying that it was "sincerely worried" about the plan, due to the bad press it could give to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A back-and-forth debate raged across Twitter Monday afternoon, with various factions of Anonymous alternately cheering and decrying the planned attack.

But in the end, the chatter drew more attention than the actual effects of the cyberprotest. NYSE.com barely blipped, and the markets finished the day with a rally: The Dow Jones industrial average finished Monday up nearly 3 percent.

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Anonymous says Nyse take-down threat was 'media scare tactic'

A threat purportedly made by Anonymous to 'erase' the New York Stock Exchange from the Internet yesterday in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests failed to materialise, with the hacker collective claiming it had been running a media scare tactic.

Last week a video appeared on YouTube in which a computer-generated voice tells viewers that "on October 10, Nyse shall be erased from the Internet" in an operation dubbed 'Invade Wall Street'.

The film exhorts supporters to use the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) botnet to launch a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack against the Nyse's Web site in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

However, the legitimacy of the message was quickly called into question, with a statement appearing online claiming to be from the 'real' Anonymous, saying: "Operation Invade Wall Street is bullshit! It is a fake planted operation by law enforcement and cyber crime agencies in order to get you to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement."

Yesterday, the day of the planned attack, Nyse said that its Web site saw no disruptions, although monitoring firm Keynote Systems claims there were two brief outages during the afternoon.

Now, in the latest twist, the Youtube account used to post the original message, TheAnonMessage, has added a new video claiming the whole thing was a "high-scale media scare tactic".

The group says that despite warnings that the planned attack on Nyse was fake, it was still widely reported. The video claims that Anonymous will now wait for the media and governments to become complacent that threats are not real and then "strike mercilessly".

Anonymous Statement Regarding #InvadeWallStreet

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Lulzsec hacker: 'we still have Sun emails, stored in China'

Sabu, the erstwhile leader of the hacking crew, says he is effectively on the run as he gives interview to Reddit readers about LulzSec's achievements, Facebook, sentencing and more

The hacker who styles himself "Sabu", erstwhile leader of the LulzSec hacking crew, claims to have a cache of emails copied from the Sun which are being stored on a Chinese server, along with data from a number of other hacks.

But he claimed this weekend that they will not be released yet: "there are a lot of interesting dumps we're sitting on due to timing," he wrote on his Twitter feed. He claims that hackers have broken into banks including HSBC and "a few others" but that they have found "no smoking guns yet" in the data there.

Sabu – who says his online handle is a tribute to the American professional wrestler – says that after the arrests in the UK and US of a number of people alleged to have been involved with the crew, he is effectively on the run. But his writing also suggests he is staying put where he lives.

"I'm past the point of no return. Not trying to sound like a bad ass, however, it's the truth," he wrote. Later he added: "The ironic twist will be that my own friends will take me down, and not these idiots who hide behind the patriot veil." He also says that "technically, I'm on the run, so there you go."

LulzSec was an offshoot of the Anonymous hacking collective which during a hacking spree in May and July 2011 broke into a number of sites, including Sony Pictures Europe, Fox.com, PBS and finally the News International site.

At the latter it altered the Sun's web page so that it redirected viewers first to a faked story about Rupert Murdoch's death, and then to their Twitter feed. The group also attacked the US Congress's web site, an FBI affiliate and brought down the web site for the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency by using a "distributed denial of service" attack.

Sabu effectively acted as the leader of the group, maintaining discipline over what they did, as leaked chatroom logs published in June by the Guardian show.

At that time he told members of the crew not to give interviews – but says his willingness to do so now is because "that was during the height of LulzSec. We all agreed to do no interviews till the end if there was ever one."

LulzSec's achievements, he says, were that it "exposed the sad state of security across the media, social, government online environments".

After the Sun hack, Sabu claimed on his Twitter feed that he was looking at 4GB of emails from the company. The claim was never confirmed, although remote access to News International's systems had been compromised.

Sabu's revelations came in a long and sometimes detailed "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) thread on Reddit. Sabu responds to a number of questions and appears to reveal a number of details about himself, such as that he is married, studied social sciences and English, that his technical hacking skills are self-taught, and that he teaches "sometimes". He claims to speak three languages – English, Spanish and German – fluently, and to have "decent" Portuguese and Italian. He says he turned towards computer hacking in 2000, when the US government "ignored the peoples' please to stop bombing Vieques" – a part of Puerto Rico used by the US navy as a bombing range until 2003. He says he likes working on cars, playing music and spending time with his family: "I'm loving life a lot this year. I barely have time for ops [hacker operations] like I used to."

That confirms other details that have been collected by rival hackers about Sabu which suggest that he is of Puerto Rican extraction, aged about 30 and based in New York.

He insists that he had no knowledge of the identities of any of the other members of LulzSec. "I simply don't know anyone's identity at Anonymous." He says that when one alleged member was arrested in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland, he had to go and look up its location: "I was a bit impressed, even." He vehemently denies the suggestions by some that he "snitched" on other LulzSec members to the authorities.

The breakup of LulzSec meant he has "lost too many friends. [I] will probably never talk to them ever again." But he thinks that it "has already achieved what it set out to achieve".

He suggests that one of the LulzSec members, called Avunit, who quit the group when it took aim at the FBI, "is relaxing somewhere on a boat".

Asked whether he is "safe", he replies: "no one can prove it's me anyway. The beauty of Anonymous." The closest that the authorities have come to him is when in September they arrested a hacker alleged to have gone by the online handle "Recursion", who was tracked down via logs held by the British company HideMyAss, which unwittingly provided a virtual private network (VPN) connection for the attack on Sony Pictures Europe.

That arrest was "probably the closest they ever got", Sabu says. He also makes a veiled threat against HideMyAss: he alleges it "turns out to be owned by some … people who are going around buying smaller VPN providers ... We should have a nice exposé for HMA and its mother computer/investors soon. Point is: research your VPN provider thoroughly."

He says he takes a number of precautions to evade law enforcement, using prepaid phones and BlackBerrys for calls and Twitter: "they're expendable. I don't ignore you, I simply don't know you." He trusts Twitter – to some extent: "believe it or not, Twitter has not been sleeping in bed with LEAs [law enforcement agencies]. In fact it's a process [for LEAs] to get account info."

He rails at the sentencing guidelines in place for computer activity: "The penalties for any cybercrime (with the exception of child pornography) is severely archaic. And enforced by non-computer users. A DDOS (distributed denial of service) should not [attract a sentence of] 10 years at all especially when rapists and murderers do LESS than time." (The Guardian's James Ball made a similar point earlier this year.)

He thinks a hacking attack against Facebook "is pointless unless some very courages [sic] individual go and burn down its datacenter containing DBs [databases]". But he calls Facebook "a serious global cancer … they have half a billion people's psychology and family down in a database".

LulzSec does not have a Google Plus account, he says: "We do NOT have a g+ account. So whoever is running it is more than likely posing and has no affiliation to us." (Other Reddit users said that files distributed from that account contain malware.) Google Plus was launched well after LulzSec apparently broke up.

His advice to would-be emulators: "Stick to yourselves. If you are in a crew – keep your opsec up 24/7. Friends will try to take you down if they have to."

Anonymous, he says, is "no leaders, no hierarchy, no cointelpro [counter-intelligence program] drama. And we are a living, moving mass of like-minded individuals." He says it is "pure democracy", though that can be anarchic. But he thinks it will spawn "many organisations and political parties". But he says that "you don't need to be 'anonymous' or need to hack to be Anonymous. It's an idea, not a job."

He says he hopes to give a talk at the next HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York, expected to run in July 2012.