Anonops #12: Spy on the Spyers

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‘Anonymous’ says it will hack more Chinese sites

The hacking group Anonymous said Friday it would continue targeting China, after announcing it had hacked hundreds of Chinese websites to protest against Internet censorship in the country.

Most of the sites Anonymous China claimed to have hacked were working normally early Friday, although some still carried error messages, among them an official site for the ruling Communist Party in the southern city of Hezhou.

But the group, which announced its existence last month via Twitter, told AFP in an email it would continue targeting Chinese sites.

“It will keep going. The targets are selected,” it said.

Anonymous said this week it had hacked 300 Chinese websites and posted messages to the government and the Chinese people.

One read: “To the Chinese people: your government controls the Internet in your country and tries to filter what he sees as a threat to him.”

Another said: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible. Today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”

China has the world’s largest online population, with more than half a billion users, but its government tightly controls the web, using a vast and sophisticated censorship system known as the “Great Firewall”.

This week’s hackings came after the government last month shut down websites, made a string of arrests and punished two popular microblogs after rumours of a coup linked to a major scandal that brought down a top politician.

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Decentralized and Open DNS To Defeat Censorship

For the last couple of years discussion around censorship of websites in the West has become as prolific as the that around already established blockades in countries such as China and Iran. While meddling with the Internet’s DNS is the weapon of choice for censors, a new P2P system called ODDNS hopes to put control back in the hands of the people.

The Internet’s Domain Name System, which translates human-readable URLs into IP addresses so that web users can more easily find Internet sites, has become a battle ground for censorship during the last couple of years.

From residing almost exclusively in the awareness of computer engineers and nerds, recent attempts by various copyright holders to censor sites such as The Pirate Bay and introduce even more broad powers with the introduction of the SOPA legislation in the US, the existence and mechanisms of the Internet’s DNS have now broken through into the mainstream.

In a response to growing attempts at censorship, various alternative DNS systems have been proposed with an emphasis on those that can’t be meddled with by the authorities. The latest, called ODDNS, comes out of France.
As its name suggests, ODDNS (Open and Decentralized DNS) is an open and decentralized DNS system running on the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) model. It’s creator, web developer Jimmy Rudolf, told PCinpact he invented the system with two specific aims in mind.
The first, and of most interest to people fighting censorship, is to “show governments that it is not possible to prevent people from talking.”

The second, of interest to anyone who owns and maintain their own domain names, is to take back control of them. “I find it absurd to have to regularly pay for a domain name,” Rudolf explained.
ODDNS is an application which allows everyone running the software to share information about domain names with each other, a bit like how a P2P network functions. ODDNS can supplement or even replace regular DNS.
ODDNS Because domain names and related IP addresses are shared among peers in the network, they can no longer be censored. Furthermore, buying a domain name from a registrar is no longer required since people running ODDNS can create and maintain their own.

Still under development, as expected the source code to ODDNS is licensed under GNU GPLv3. PCinpact reports that the current ODDNS website will be updated next week and the first beta release of the software will follow shortly after.

Of course the success of the project will sit on the developers’ ability to overcome the technical hurdles and, crucially, if they can encourage enough people to come on board and stay on board. The desire to stick with this kind of system will be driven by need so more censorship will become this and similar projects’ lifeblood.

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UK 'exporting surveillance technology to repressive nations'

Fears that software similar to that which government wants to use in Britain is being sold to monitor dissidents abroad

Britain is exporting surveillance technology to countries run by repressive regimes, sparking fears it is being used to track political dissidents and activists.

The UK's enthusiastic role in the burgeoning but unregulated surveillance market is becoming an urgent concern for human rights groups, who want the government to ensure that exports are regulated in a similar way to arms.

Much of the technology, which allows regimes to monitor internet traffic, mobile phone calls and text messages, is similar to that which the government has controversially signalled it wants to use in the UK.

The campaign group, Privacy International, which monitors the use of surveillance technology, claims equipment being exported includes devices known as "IMSI catchers" that masquerade as normal mobile phone masts and identify phone users and malware – software that can allow its operator to control a target's computer, while allowing the interception to remain undetected.

Trojan horse software that allows hackers to remotely activate the microphone and camera on another person's phone, and "optical cyber solutions" that can tap submarine cable landing stations, allowing for the mass surveillance of entire populations, are also being exported, according to the group.

Privacy International said it had visited international arms and security fairs and identified at least 30 UK companies that it believes have exported surveillance technology to countries including Syria, Iran, Yemen and Bahrain. A further 50 companies exporting similar technology from the US were also identified. Germany and Israel were also identified as big exporters of surveillance technology, in what is reportedly a £3bn a year industry.

Last month Privacy International asked 160 companies about sales of equipment to repressive regimes. So far fewer than 10 have written back to deny selling to nations with poor human rights records. The campaign group warns: "The emerging information and communications infrastructures of developing countries are being hijacked for surveillance purposes, and the information thereby collected is facilitating unlawful interrogation practices, torture and extrajudicial executions."

Many of the brochures, presentations and marketing videos used by surveillance companies to promote their technology have now been posted on the WikiLeaks website, while a list of firms identified by Privacy International as a cause for concern has been provided to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The trade minister, Mark Prisk, has been briefed on the situation.

Last month the European council banned the export of surveillance technologies to Iranian authorities in response to serious human rights violations. It has imposed similar bans on exports to Syria.

But human rights groups said equipment was still being sold to commercial organisations in the two countries and called for the government to take stronger action.

"By the time the embargo is in place the ship has sailed," said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. "Our research shows the idea that this is not a British problem is wrong. We need governments to act now. In a few years this equipment will need to be updated; these countries don't have the technical expertise to do it, so this is something the UK needs to be aware of and to take action against now."

In December it emerged a British company had offered to sell software to Egyptian security services that experts say could hack into web-based email. The company, Gamma Group International, insists it "complies, in all its dealings, with all relevant UK legislation".

Last year a public outcry forced an Italian company to pull out of supplying Syria with "deep packet investigation" technology that would allow the country's security forces to access internet service providers. But Syriatel Mobile, Syria's largest mobile phone operator, uses blocking technology provided by a Dublin-based company.

Creativity Software (CS), a British firm specialising in "location-based services", sold technology to the mobile network operator MTN Irancell that campaign groups said could be used to track individuals. The company said its technology provided "the same type of activities that are enjoyed by consumers in many other markets – a hugely popular and successful social networking and location-based mobile advertising service".

It is the responsibility of manufacturers to ensure their technology is not used to perpetrate human rights abuses. But there are now calls for them to be subject to stringent export controls requiring a licence to sell abroad.

Privacy International also argues that, in order to prevent dangerous technologies reaching authoritarian regimes through middlemen, there is a need for "end-use" controls that would make it illegal for companies to provide their products when they know or suspect they will be used in human rights abuses.

In a letter to Privacy International, Downing Street said the government was "actively looking at this issue" and was working within the EU to introduce new controls on surveillance.

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Pastebin to hire staff to tackle hackers' 'sensitive' posts

The owner of Pastebin.com says he plans to hire more staff to help police "sensitive information" posted to the site.

The website is frequently used by Anonymous and other hackers to reveal data taken from their targets.

In the past this has included home addresses, email passwords and bank account details.

Pastebin currently relies on an abuse report system to alert it to material that might need to be removed.

Jeroen Vader, a 28 year-old Dutch entrepreneur, bought the site from its original owner in early 2010.

In that time he says he has helped grow its popularity, as it now attracts an average of 17 million unique visitors a month. The site makes money from banner adverts on its pages.

Revelations

Many visitors to the site use it to keep watch over trending topics. These often include articles posted by people who identify themselves as being linked to the hacktivist collective Anonymous, or related movements such as Antisec or Lulzsec.

Recent posts have included details of attacks on Panda Labs, the Spanish security firm; Stratfor, the US risk analysis firm; and email addresses and passwords belonging to users of the Youporn pornography sites.

In January, users who discovered that feeds from thousands of Trendnet home security cameras could be accessed to spy on their owners posted details of the internet addresses and locations of some of the breached devices on its site.

Pastebin asks its members not to post password lists, source code or personal information.

Mr Vader said he currently received on average a total of 1,200 abuse reports a day via Pastebin's on-site notification system and by email.

"I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported," he told the BBC.

"Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information."
Blocked users

Mr Vader noted that personal information about himself had been posted to Pastebin, which he "quickly" removed.

He confirmed reports that the site had been blocked in Pakistan and Turkey after material hacked from local databases was published.

However, he said that people in both countries were still finding ways to visit the site, and traffic from the two nations had only fallen by about 50%.

Mr Vader also noted that Pastebin itself is the victim of unidentified hackers.

"In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn't get some kind of DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack," he said.

"I do hear from people in the hackers community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin."

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Global Internet Slowdown: Is Anonymous to Blame?

Anonymous is claiming responsibility for a cyberattack against Chinese websites — one that may also be having an impact on Internet speeds across the world.

Networks in North America, Europe and especially Asia were running at significantly lower speeds Thursday. Asia’s cyber backbone was especially hard hit, seeing packet loss of 33% or more, according to the monitoring website Internet Traffic Report.

Anonymous, a loosely knit group of hackers, took credit for defacing up to 500 Chinese websites Thursday, according to ABC News.

“Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall,” reads a message left on the homepages of attacked sites.

Other messages encouraged Chinese citizens to join a revolution against the Chinese government and left instructions for bypassing Internet filters installed by the Chinese government to prevent citizens from freely accessing the web.

There was no explicit connection between the site defacements and the Asian slowdown. But Anonymous’s attacks also often come in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Thousands of connections are made to a specific server causing it to crash from an overload of web traffic.

If such an attack is carried out on a massive scale, it can have consequences for Internet speeds across the world.

An eerie, two-word message left on an Anonymous Twitter account seems to back up that theory: “Don’t panic,” with a smiley face emoticon.

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Audiomicro

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Hacked By Anonymous
Lol

AdRev Copyright Trolls Beware! You now have the attention of Anonymous

Under the name AdRev you wrongly claim ownership of audio from other peoples YouTube videos in order to make money fraudulently. This will no longer be tolerated. We consider this your first and final warning.

We are Anonymous
We Are Legion
Expect Us»

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I've been waiting for someone to do a little research on this. Very interesting! It would appear from the leaked logs that team pois0n didn't know that in ^ sane was sabu and they're all unknowingly part of a sting.

Lol at this tweet: @anonymouSabu i think you've just united morons. antisec was supposed to be an ethical imperative of the priestly caste and thats it.

So he's shitting on a member of his team. Can you imagine how hilarious that would be if in pois0n's IRCs MLT goes on a tirade agaist lulzsec/sabu, all the while iN^ SaNe (aka Sabu) has to hold his shit together while going, "yeah what a twat! Let's hax0r him!"

Hackers: backstabbers backstabbing backstabbers.

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Anonymous to launch Operation Cannabis 420 campaign

First Netflix, now the drug war. Anonymous is taking absolutely no prisoners this week.

The hacktivist group has declared a new project: Operation Cannabis 420. The informal Internet collective has declared April 20, a traditional day of observance for those in the marijuana community, as a day of action for all occupiers around the world and will launch a full campaign to educate the masses and (hopefully) end the war on drugs.

A press release put out today (April 9) highlights the myriad of medicinal uses for cannabis, and states, "Cannabis has been oppressed by the powers that be that are afraid of its true benefits, and these benefits do help all of mankind! So cannabis fits the criteria for Anonymous support."

And just what can you do? "We ask that all Anons and individuals please support the legalization efforts in any way possible! Even simply signing a petition or sharing info or even just having an open mind about the subject will help!" The group is also asking people to make their online social-media photos green on April 20 as a show of solidarity.

Anonymous and cannabis. It's like my two favourite things all rolled into one. If I didn't have a calendar, I'd swear it was Christmas.

Anonymous #OpCannabis 420

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Anonymous Leaks Tunisia Prime Minister’s Emails

Anonymous Hackers says it has hacked 2,725 emails belonging to Tunisia's ruling Ennahda party, including those of the prime minister, in the latest challenge to the Islamist-led government. The email addresses of the president, head of the Constituent Assembly, Ennahdha party officials, and other party leaders were disclosed as well as documents from the electoral campaigns.

In a video posted on a Facebook page belonging to Anonymous TN, a hacker wearing the trademark activist "Guy Fawkes" mask, said the emails were released in protest against Ennahda's alleged failure to protect the unemployed and artists who were attacked by Salafi Islamists during a recent protest.

The activist said the emails include phone numbers, bank transactions and invoices paid during Tunisia's election campaign in October, in which Ennahda won more than 40 percent of parliament seats, going on to lead the government.

The Tunisian government seems to think the emails are pretty old, but are investigating if the emails from Jebali are from before or after the election.

Anonymous is pushing against internet censorship in Tunisia, and promised: "To the Tunisian government, we have kept a large part of your data secret. If you do not wish to see these published on the internet we ask you to work to the best of your ability to avoid internet censorship and to respect human rights and the freedom of expression in Tunisia."

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Anonymous wants to take down the Great Firewall of China

Last week, I wrote about how the hacktivist group Anonymous has a new Chinese branch, Anonymous China, which has been very active since it launched its Twitter account on March 30, 2012. The group has hacked and defaced hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites to the point where China even acknowledged the attacks. The hacking has continued against various websites, but even more importantly, the group has declared a new target: the so-called Great Firewall of China.

Since my last two reports, Anonymous China has hacked shangzhi.gov.cn, publicly posting eight user names and passwords on Pastebay. This was soon followed by the hacking of szzfcg.gov.cn, which resulted in the sites full database being leaked and posted to Wikisend. The document was hard to parse, but I could easily see that it included thousands of e-mail addresses, logins, and passwords.

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ACTA-rapporteur raadt omstreden anti-piraterijverdrag afDe Britse socialist David Martin, die namens het Europees Parlement de Handelsovereenkomst ter bestrijding van namaak (ACTA) behandelt, heeft zich vandaag zelf tegen het omstreden anti-piraterijverdrag gekeerd. Hij raadt Europarlementariërs aan om niet met het verdrag in te stemmen.

Dat zei Martin vandaag na afloop van een bijeenkomst van de Progressieve Alliantie van Socialisten en Democraten. Met 184 van de in totaal 736 zetels is dat de op één na grootste fractie in het Europarlement. Volgens Martin verandert het verdrag niets aan de Europese wet, en levert het de Europese Unie te weinig op.

Privégebruik
Zo zou er volgens hem in het verdrag te weinig onderscheid worden gemaakt tussen privé- en commercieel gebruik. En het enige dat het Europa oplevert, is meer samenwerking met enkele andere landen. De voordelen wegen uiteindelijk niet op tegen de nadelen, denkt hij. De ACTA-rapporteur zal daarom in zijn eindverslag aanraden om het verdrag te verwerpen.

ACTA, voluit: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is al aangenomen door de Europese Commissie. Maar naast het Europarlement moeten ook de individuele Eurolanden, waaronder Nederland, er nog mee instemmen. Gebeurt dat niet, dan is het verdrag van de baan.

Onder andere in Nederland is er veel weerstand tegen de wet, die internationale standaarden voor de bescherming van de rechten van producenten van muziek, films, farmaceutica, mode en tal van andere producten probeert te harmoniseren. Tegenstanders noemen het ook wel de 'censuurwet', omdat het de internetvrijheid drastisch zou beperken.

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Two from Team Poison arrested in MI6 hotline phone hack

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Police in the UK have arrested two teens as part of an investigation into illegal recordings of conversations on Scotland Yard’s anti-terror hotline, which were later posted on Youtube. Two teenage boys aged 16 and 17 years have been arrested in the West Midlands in connection with an investigation into reports that hackers accessed Scotland Yard's anti-terror hotline.

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Met Denies Anti-Terrorism Hotline Hacked

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Scotland Yard has denied its computer systems were hacked after a recording emerged of a confidential phone discussion between counter-terrorism officers.

Activists from the Teampoison hacker collective claimed they were able to breach security and make the recording, which was posted on YouTube a few hours later.

It appears to be a recording of officers discussing an earlier attack by Teampoison members.

This earlier attack involved the counter-terrorism hotline being bombarded with prank calls allegedly launched by Teampoison computers.

But a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) said: "We are confident the MPS communication systems have not been breached and remain, as they always have been, secure.

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Detonate said: "We did it with ease. Their security is bizarre, it's as if they have no security whatsoever. The security they lack, it's incredible. They use an old phone system. It's pretty much the art of phreaking (phone hacking).

twitter:

OpCensorThis twitterde op vrijdag 13-04-2012 om 07:11:38 All of #TeaMp0isoN is fine! Not v&! Trust us! reageer retweet

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Privacy-protective ISP raises over $43,000 in donations in one day

Privacy may not be quite dead yet: proposal for surveillance-resistant Internet provider, which could become the ACLU's dream and the FBI's nightmare, finds some early fundraising success.

An ambitious effort to launch an Internet service provider designed from its inception to be privacy-protective and surveillance-resistant has raised more than $43,000 in only one day.

A CNET article published yesterday morning profiled Nicholas Merrill, who's raising funds to launch what he calls a national "nonprofit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.

Merrill, 39, set up a donation page on the Indiegogo crowd funding site a few hours after the article appeared. With the help of an enthusiastic response on Reddit.com, the donations began pouring in. By this evening, donations had reached $43,214 out of a target of $1 million.

"I had no idea that the crowd funding would take off as much as it has in such a short time," Merrill told CNET today. "I hope that people will continue to spread the word and help Calyx reach its funding goal so this plan can come to fruition sooner rather than later."

Merrill also has a donation page on the Web site of the nonprofit he launched, called The Calyx Institute. (He said that Kickstarter "wouldn't accept Calyx as a campaign because it's not a physical product, or arts-related.")

He added: "I am grateful for the outpouring of support which I think clearly demonstrates that there is a vast public demand for privacy-conscious telecommunications companies"

Calyx isn't exactly the first Internet provider to pitch privacy as a business model. C2Net, better known for developing the Apache Web server software, tried a more limited form before being bought by Red Hat in 2000.

But Merrill has a unique qualification: while running a previous Internet service provider, he was the first person to fight back against the Patriot Act's expanded police powers -- and win.

In February 2004, the FBI sent Merrill a secret "national security letter" (not an actual court order signed by a judge) asking for confidential information about his customers and forbidding him from disclosing the letter's existence. He enlisted the ACLU to fight the gag order and won. A federal judge barred the FBI from invoking that portion of the law, saying it was "an "unconstitutional prior restraint of speech in violation of the First Amendment."

Merrill's plan is to resell wireless service, such as 4G WiMax broadband, and add end-to-end encryption for Web browsing and encrypted e-mail. So if the Feds show up with a legal court order -- something that the National Security Agency and FBI don't always do -- he couldn't help even if he wanted to.

"The idea that we are working on is to not be capable of complying," Merrill says.

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News and information about Anonymous hacker groups.

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We warned you to go away. and you posted this? [link]
Your internet is now disconnected, website hacked, and all twitter accounts suspended. email accounts and domain name was stolen, u butthurt?

You better lock your doors bro, we're real people in the real world!

[#] @ihazcandy suspended
[#] @enigmazrr suspended
[#] consternation.us stolen
[#] cnationsec@gmail.com stolen
[#] phone disconnected
[#] IRC shell pure.consternation.us DDOSED off the planet!

p.s we talked to that lovely wife of yours.
She should "Expect Us"

[#] Follow us on Twitter [#]

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Op zondag 15 april 2012 15:45 schreef sinterklaaskapoentje het volgende:
Dat er nog zo veel 'nieuws' over is. Politiek tast nog steeds in het duister. Anonymous leeft op 4chan niet meer zo volgens mij.

twitter:

jack867 twitterde op zondag 15-04-2012 om 16:02:55 @YourAnonNews @CabinCr3w For #TRicK Dutch telecom KPN owned by #Team_h44t33_Anon as well - all #Bioware servers #Anon #Antisec #Anonymous reageer retweet