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Tag: Anonymous

  • Anonymous Announces Operation Pirate Bay In Response To Police Raids

    Anonymous Announces Operation Pirate Bay In Response To Police Raids

    Web hosting company PRQ was raided by the police yesterday as the authorities were searching for servers containing copyrighted content. The Web host was founded by two founders of The Pirate Bay, and as such, people freaked out when The Pirate Bay also went down. As of this writing, The Pirate Bay is still down, but the staff claimed it was just a power outage.

    Even if The Pirate Bay wasn’t taken down, a number of other torrent sites went down as a result of the police raid. In response, Anonymous has announced Operation Pirate Bay. They are attacking Swedish government Web sites as a protest against what they feel is “a crime against freedom of information.”

    Here’s the full video:

    As of this writing, Anonymous has managed to take down a number of Swedish governmental Web sites. They have also merged Operation Pirate Bay into the Free Assange and Free Anakata movements. Svartholm, who goes by Anakata, was recently deported to Sweden from Cambodia.

    For now, it looks like Anonymous is using this as an excuse to continue their campaign against Sweden. DDoS campaigns rarely ever bring about any kind of change, and only serve to anger most Internet users. It may be the Internet equivalent of a sit in, but Anonymous may want to change their tactics in the future if they really want to achieve any kind of change.

    It should also be noted once again that The Pirate Bay has not been taken down by Swedish authorities. The official story so far is that a power outage is affecting the site. Many members of Anonymous are already relaying this information to people, but other members are going ahead with the attacks regardless. Those who just want The Pirate Bay back shouldn’t have to wait much longer as the site said they’ll be back within the hour.

  • Anonymous Documentary Leaked Online, Official Release Coming October 19

    There are a lot of misconceptions about Anonymous. Members of the group feel that the media unfairly portrays them in a negative light. To combat the negative image, a team of filmmakers have spent the last year filming a documentary that looks at both sides of the Anonymous movement.

    It was announced last week that the film “We Are Legion – The Story of the Hacktivists” would be first screened at select theaters on October 19. The film would then be available for online on October 30. An Anonymous group has released the film on YouTube, but the filmmakers say the leaked version is a rough cut. They will be releasing the final version, with new content, this month.

    If you want to watch the leaked version anyway, here’s what you’re getting into:

    We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, takes us inside the complex culture and history of Anonymous. The film explores early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater, and then moves to Anonymous’ own raucous and unruly beginnings on the website 4Chan.

    Through interviews with current members – some recently returned from prison, others still awaiting trial – as well as writers, academics and major players in various “raids,” We Are Legion traces the collective’s breathtaking evolution from merry pranksters to a full-blown, global movement, one armed with new weapons of civil disobedience for an online world.

    The film is made by a team of expert filmmakers who have chronicled other powerful players and groups in the tech world. Their expertise in the subject matter shows as the film has been named an official selection at 14 film festivals around the world.

    The filmmakers have not announced pricing yet, but they mention comedian Louis C.K. as an inspiration for their pricing plans. You can expect the film to be released directly to prospective buyers on October 30 for a small price. Even if you check out the leaked version, supporting the official release would not be bad idea.

  • Anonymous Own3r Continues To Mess With GoDaddy, Links To Anonymous Message [Updated]

    In case you haven’t been following, GoDaddy suffered a major outage on Monday, temporarily shutting down numerous sites across the web. Anonymous member Anonymous Own3r claimed responsibility for an attack on GoDaddy early on, and has been tweeting about the ordeal ever since.

    This morning, GoDaddy put out a statement saying that it had not been hacked, and blamed the outage on internal issues. Anonymous Own3r’s response to that was:

    Anonymous Own3r later tweeted, “I think I will have to bring down godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack.”

    Since then, it’s been a series of tweets including one linking to the following Anonymous message to GoDaddy:

    Anonymous Message: GoDaddy

    ————–>Follow @AnonOpsLegion / @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter<-------------- ============================================================== Hello Citizens of the world, We are Anonymous. Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes and expose the truth! It has come to our attention that Go Daddy, an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company has gained the attention of anonymous and the world yesterday as it was experiencing "intermittent outages." As silly as it seems, many members of anonymous are still puzzled whether it was truly an Anonymous member or a government entity is still unknown. However, many of us have concluded that Go Daddy was taken down because of its support for SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act." Go Daddy has committed many blatant attempt to destroy the Civil rights of the Ninety Nine percent. Political website that contained stinging criticism of the Obama administration have been removed by Go Daddy because it was, in there words, "maliciously harmful to individuals in the government." Therefor Anonymous asks the ninety nine percent to boycott Go Daddy and remove there hosting to another domain name servers. Anonymous would like to point out that Go Daddy who is, currently running millions of sites around the world, is actively putting SOPA, a bill that was petitioned by four point five million people, into effect. Manchurian Candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, has already committed many acts of destruction against the constitution of the United States claiming it as an "Imperfect document" and he has already signed such unconstitutional bills as NDAA "national defense Authorization Act"and Executive order NDRA "National Defense Resources Preparedness." These bills are violations to our constitutional and civil liberties. People of the world, Our internet freedom is dwindling because of government tyranny. For the love of all our future and humanity, wake up and open your eyes before the United States of America follows in the footsteps of Communist China. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. we do not forget. Expect us. See: http://www.infowars.com/obama-truth-team-orders-godaddy-to-shut-down-website/ [Obama Truth Team Orders Go Daddy To Shut Down Website] and http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/03/godaddy-silence/ [Go Daddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site]

    Other recent tweets include:

    No word on any of this from GoDaddy since the statement. There is talk on Twitter that the code he uploaded is fake.

    Update: GoDaddy VP, Public Relations, Elizabeth Driscoll, tells WebProNews:

    The “source code” released on Twitter is not Go Daddy source code. It is code from a 2010 app called ttpython. To see where the files originated, you can visit http://code.google.com/p/ttpython/source/browse/#svn/trunk/godaddy.

    For more coverage, see this page. You can see both the latest tweets from AnonymousOwn3r and from GoDaddy from one page here.

  • Anonymous Own3r: I May Have To Bring Down GoDaddy “Again”

    The GoDaddy saga continues…

    To recap, on Monday, the company experienced a major outage. Many sites were down as a result. For hours, the company would not give any details about what happened, other than to basically say it was aware of the problem and was working on it. A member of Anonymous going by the handle Anonymous Own3r took credit for an attack on GoDaddy resulting in this outage. Today, GoDaddy put out a statement saying that service has been fully restored, and that it was not a hack nor the result of any external influence. Just some internal issues.

    Here’s what Anonymous Own3r had to say about that:

    “I think I will have to bring down godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack,” Anonymous Own3r said in a later tweet, before retweeting this one:

    It will certainly be interesting to see what happens from here.

  • GoDaddy: Service Is Fully Restored, And It Was Not A Hack

    On Monday, GoDaddy experienced a big outage, as you probably know by now. The company is now saying that service is fully restored, and that despite one Anonymous member’s claim that he was responsible, GoDaddy is saying that it was not a hack, nor was it caused by any external influences.

    Here’s the full statement from interim CEO Scott Wagner:

    Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

    The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

    At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

    Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.

    We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.

    – Scott Wagner
    Go Daddy Interim CEO

    I’m not sure if the news that this was not the result of external influences will do much to make users happy, but it is what it is. We haven’t seen any new tweets from Anonymous Own3r since the statement came out.

    More on the whole saga here.

  • Hacker Taking Credit For GoDaddy Outage Says He Can Bring Down Google Too

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    On Monday, GoDaddy suffered a major outage, taking many sites offline for hours. It appears that the company is still dealing with getting everything back in order, though it says the majority of its affected customers are back online.

    You can follow that whole sequence of events here.

    A member of Anonymous, going by the handle Anonymous Own3r has been taking credit for the attack, and has been saying a lot of things on Twitter since the whole thing happened. Among those things: that he has taken down Facebook in the past, and is capable of taking down Google.

     

    He doesn’t say that he’s going to take down Google, mind you, but if he’s really responsible for the GoDaddy incident, this should put some people on edge.

    We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update accordingly.

    Update: After another publication picked up this story, Anonymous Own3r tweeted:

  • What’s Life Like Without The Internet? Just Ask This Ex-Anonymous Member

    We tend to think of the Internet as something that’s needed for everyday life. It’s now gotten to the point where our online identity is still active even when we’re not physically at a computer or mobile device. It seems like it would be impossible to go without the Internet, but what happens when we’re forced out of the online world? One ex-LulzSec hacker says it’s “serene.”

    Jake Davis, otherwise known as Topiary, was one of the LulzSec hackers arrested on July 27, 2011 in connection with attacks on various Web sites. Since then, he’s been out on conditional bail where he has agreed to not use the Internet. He also pled guilty to hacking charges back in June.

    It’s been over a year since his arrest and he hasn’t used the Internet once. Davis wrote a piece for The Guardian where he describes his experience without the Internet. It’s a fascinating look at a man who once spent almost every waking moment online being forced to make such a drastic change.

    As expected, Davis says the change has its pros and cons. The instant gratification of online life has been replaced by the more calm progression of life that’s defined by physical interaction.

    It seems strange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousands of years without this simple connectivity, and now we in modern society struggle to comprehend existence without it. In a word, life is serene. I now find myself reading newspapers as though they weren’t ancient scrolls; entering real shops with real money in order to buy real products, and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakable horror into every possible social situation. Nothing needs to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence of keystrokes.

    He says that the one thing he does miss is the “instant companionship of online life.” Still, he claims that it’s “oddly endearing” to be disconnected from his past digital life. It has helped him sleep better and he no longer sees “flashing shapes” when he closes his eyes.

    In the end, he encourages others who are constantly on the Web to “take a short break.” It’s apparently helped him become a more “fulfilled individual,” and it just might work for others who need a break. Like Davis says, “It can’t hurt to try.”

  • GoDaddy: Some Service Has Been Restored

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    GoDaddy tweeted to say that some service has been restored, after a major outage and an apparent attack from an Anonymous member.

    More on this developing story here.

    While, just about as vague as its earlier acknowledgement of the issue, GoDaddy simply tweeted:

  • Here’s The Latest From GoDaddy (And Anonymous Own3r)

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    As you may know, GoDaddy experienced a major outage on Monday, affecting a number of sites somewhere between a reported “thousands” and a reported “millions”. Regardless of the number, a simple Twitter search has been able to make it pretty clear that it upset a lot of people.

    GoDaddy has been able to things at least partially restored, but is currently still working on it.

    More on the story here.

    A member of Anonymous has taken credit for an attack, and has suggested that it could last from anywhere between an hour and a month. Just so you have a spot to easily see the latest from both GoDaddy and Anonymous Own3r, here are both of their real-time Twitter timelines, courtesy of Twitter’s new embeddable timelines feature:




  • GoDaddy Could Be Down From One Hour To One Month, Anonymous Own3r Says

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    As previously reported, GoDaddy is experiencing some downtime, and a member of Anonymous is taking credit (though only on behalf of himself).

    More on this developing story here.

    When asked on Twitter how long he plans for this to go on, Anonymous Own3r indicated that it could last for one hour or for one month. Here’s the exchange:

     
     

    GoDaddy has tweeted that it is aware of the situation, and is working on it. It will be interesting to see how long it actually does go on. Meanwhile, people just want their sites to work so they can get on with business as usual.

  • GoDaddy Down Thanks To Anonymous Member?

    GoDaddy Down Thanks To Anonymous Member?

    Update: GoDaddy says service is completely restored, and that the outage was not the result of a hack. Full statement here.

    As previously reported, GoDaddy is experiencing some major technical difficulties, apparently with DNS servers down. An anonymous member has taken credit for an attack, but not on behalf of the larger Anonymous entity, as the member corrected TechCrunch on Twitter…

    More on this developing story here.

    According to that TechCruch report, “millions” of sites have been taken down. The NextWeb reports that some of GoDaddy’s DNS servers are down, and that GoDaddy hosted email accounts are down.

    And the reasoning, according to Anonymous Own3r:

    GoDaddy has acknowledged the issues, but only in a very vague manner:

    As we’ve seen in other instances of GoDaddy turmoil, competitors in the hosting space are jumping at the chance to offer people deals to change providers.

  • ACTA Ratified In Japan, Citizens Plan Protests

    The key to a democratic government’s continued strength is that all its dealings are made in the open with input from its citizens. That has not been the case with ACTA. Citizens of the European Union force the discussion out into the open which caused the European Parliament to shoot down the treaty. Other countries have not been so lucky.

    The Inquirer reports that Japan is the latest country to ratify ACTA. What makes this ratification so rotten is that it was done in the middle of the night. According to Japan’s Internet Watch, the treaty was quickly shoved through the House of Representatives without any kind of debate.

    A quick passage seems par for the course when it comes to the current political climate of Japan. The Japanese government seems to have no problem when it comes to bending over backwards to appease content owners. Japan passed a law back in June that would make it a crime to watch YouTube videos of copyrighted content. Not to mention, the law also punishes the creation of back-up copies for personal use.

    After the passage of the aforementioned YouTube law, Anonymous took to the streets in protest. They are planning on doing so again with the Pirate Party of Japan to protest the ratification of ACTA. They’re planning the protests to begin on September 9. The Japanese have proven that they’re pretty good at protesting, but the government has also proven that they’re pretty good at ignoring the demands of its citizens.

    ACTA is still being debated around the world. TPP is also very much alive and well. We’ll continue to follow these trade agreements and deliver any updates as they come around. Unfortunately, updates don’t come often due to the secrecy that’s afforded to these treaties.

  • Apple Says They Didn’t Give Device IDs To FBI

    The latest Anonymous escapade already has everybody talking. On Monday, the AntiSec branch leaked 1 million Apple device IDs onto the Internet. They claim that the IDs came from a larger dump of 12 million IDs they took from an FBI laptop. This morning, the FBI issued a statement saying that the accusation was false. Since then, we’ve been waiting to hear back from the last party involved – Apple.

    In a statement to All Things D, Apple said that the FBI never requested device IDs. They also said that they have never given the IDs out to any organization, including the FBI. The company made a note to say that they would be replacing device IDs with a new set of APIs soon and that future apps will be banned if they use the IDs.

    Out of all the groups involved, Apple is the one that you could trust the most on this issue. They stand to gain nothing from giving personal information to the authorities. They have everything to lose, in the form of a PR disaster, if all 12 million IDs are leaked. They’re going to be working double time to figure out how AntiSec got a hold of the IDs.

    As usual, AntiSec is having a little fun with the news.

    Even more interesting is the next Tweet from AntiSec:

    It’s hard to imagine a headline more powerful than Apple revealing the iPhone 5 on September 12 next week. The only two things that could get bigger news coverage than the reveal would be either Anonymous leaking the rest of the device IDs or proving the FBI connection. They could also mean something else entirely unrelated to the iPhone. My money is on a vague threat meant to induce the so-called “lulz,” but AntiSec has already proven that they have something. This could be an Anonymous threat that people will have to take seriously.

    As always, we’ll continue to monitor the situation and update you should anything change. I expect we’ll hear something by the end of the week.

  • FBI Claims They Never Had The Leaked Apple Device IDs

    Anonymous’ AntiSec branch is back with a vengeance. The group leaked a million Apple device IDs on Monday. They claim to have an additional 11 million IDs just waiting to be leaked. One of the leaked IDs even belonged to President Obama’s iPad. The most interesting part of the story, however, is how they obtained the IDs. Anonymous says that they obtained the IDs from an FBI agent’s laptop, but the FBI has refuted this claim.

    The FBI published a short statement on Tuesday afternoon that denied all of AntiSec’s allegations. Here’s their statement in full:

    The FBI is aware of published reports alleging that an FBI laptop was compromised and private data regarding Apple UDIDs was exposed. At this time, there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data.

    The FBI took a more direct approach on Twitter. They even typed part of the statement in all caps – the equivalent of screaming on the Internet.

    Anonymous has responded with their own allegations that the FBI is lying, while poking fun at their use of all caps.

    At the time, the FBI or Anonymous have no proof in regards to their statements. We can only take both of them at face value. The FBI won’t admit to having any of the data in question, especially if it was taken by Anonymous. Likewise, Anonymous has a score to settle with the FBI and will do anything to discredit them in a public forum.

    We’ll continue to watch this story as it develops. The ball’s back in Anonymous’ court and there’s no telling what they’ll do next.

    [h/t: Wired]

  • President Obama’s iPad Among The Million Apple IDs Leaked

    The big ticket news item this morning came from one of Anonymous’ biggest stunts in months. The group claimed to have gained access to 12 million unique device IDs that are used across all of Apple’s iOS products including the iPhone and iPad. Anonymous only leaked 1 million IDs, but one of them already has everybody talking.

    After news of the dump broke out, everybody began crafting software that would allow people to check their ID against the leaked database. It was soon found that one ID belonged to that of President Obama. The iPad in question has its device name set to “hobamain.” As Mashable points out, the device name is a mash up of “Obama”, “Main” and the first letter of Obama’s middle name.

    Of course, it’s just as likely that this isn’t Obama’s iPad. There could be any number of people out there who would use that specific character set for their device’s name. It’s highly unlikely though which leads to the current speculation. Is this a national security risk? Not likely. I doubt that President carries any sensitive data on his iPad anyway.

    The same program that found out Obama’s Apple ID also has some other interesting statistics. Over 42,000 iPhone owners were too lazy to change their device ID to something other than “iPhone.” Interestingly enough, a lot of people named John must buy iPads as “John’s iPad” is the device ID for over 1,000 iPads.

    Anonymous claims to still have over 11 million IDs and they very well could release more. We’ll continue to follow the story as it develops. If anything, it should finally convince Apple to do away with its unique device ID system.

    [Image Credit: Pete Souza/White House]

  • Apple IDs At The Center Of Major Security Story Again [Updated]

    Apple IDs are back in the news, thanks to a big hacking story, courtesy of Anonymous.

    As previously reported, the AntiSec branch of Anonymous took to Pastebin to detail how it leaked a million Apple Device IDs (unique device identifier numbers – UDIDs) and other personal information by breaching an FBI notebook. They allegedly gained access to 12 million device IDs, but only published a million of them.

    In the long document, the group wrote:

    During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of ”NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

    so…penis.

    The group also used the document to express support to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and for the Russian punk band Pussy Riot.

    More on that story here.

    The whole thing may have some Apple users a little rattled, particularly given that Apple IDs were at the center of one of last month’s big security stories.

    About a month ago, Wired writer Mat Honan wrote a lengthy piece about an “epic hacking,” he experienced. At the root of the problem were some security issues related to Apple IDs and Amazon accounts.

    “Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account,” Honan wrote at the time. “Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.”

    You remember that story right? It was all over the tech news. In a later piece about his digital recovery, Honan wrote, “It’s shameful that Apple has asked its users to put so much trust in its cloud services, and not put better security mechanisms in place to protect them. AppleIDs are too easily reset, which effectively makes iCloud a data security nightmare. I’ve had person after person after person report similar instances to me, some providing documentation showing how easily their Apple accounts were compromised.”

    “And due to Apple’s opacity, I have no way of knowing if things have improved,” he added.”Apple has refused to tell me in what ways its policies weren’t followed ‘completely’ in my case. Despite being an Apple user for nearly 20 years and having generally positive feelings toward the company, I no longer trust it to do the right thing in terms of protecting my data. I’ve turned off its Find My services and won’t turn them back on.”

    Apple has a big event planned for the launch of the next iPhone for September 12. While that is very much anticipated by Apple users and future Apple users, perhaps another event centered around security is in order to set minds at ease.

    Update: Apple and the FBI are both denying that the FBI had these IDs to begin with.

  • Anonymous Leaks 1 Million Apple Device IDs

    After members of LulzSec were taken down by the FBI, Anonymous fought back with #FFF (F*ck FBI Friday). The campaign would see attacks launched against the FBI and its affiliates every Friday. This went on for a while until Anonymous either lost interest or moved on to something else. The group seems to have started up #FFF again, but the FBI isn’t the only group involved this time.

    The AntiSec branch of Anonymous posted a lengthy note on Pastebin yesterday detailing their latest exploit. It involves a lot of FBI baiting and the claim that they hacked a notebook owned by an FBI operative. Here’s the story:

    During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of ”NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

    So, what did Anonymous do with the 12 million device IDs they allegedly obtained from an FBI agent? They published 1 million of them online to draw attention to what they see as warrantless tracking of US citizens by the FBI. They make it very clear that they aren’t in the business of compromising the security of regular users. They redacted all of the personal information from the alleged FBI document and only posted the device IDs.

    Anonymous is also hoping their actions make Apple reconsider using device IDs with their iOS devices. They feel that it makes tracking people far too easy and they want to see an iPhone that makes it harder for Federal Agents to track.

    Even with the removal of personal data, there’s still quite a bit of information contained in the dump. The Apple device IDs are joined by Apple’s Push Notification Service Tokens, Device Name and Device Type. Chances are that you’re one of the million that had your device ID leaked. The Next Web has set up a handy little Web site where you can check to see if your device ID is on the list.

    We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and we’ll update this story if they get back to us.

  • Wikileaks Finds A Friend In Anonymous With #OpFreeAssange

    Wikileaks and Anonymous have been close for quite some time now. Many of the recent leaks that have come out of Wikileaks were obtained by members within Anonymous. With Julian Assange under fire at the Ecuadorian embassy, Anonymous have taken it upon themselves to back him up with their usual tactics.

    Computer World UK is reporting that Anonymous attacked various UK government Web sites with DDoS attacks. It’s called #OpFreeAssange and it’s a protest against the UK’s handling of the Assange situation. After being granted asylum by the government of Ecuador, the UK says that they will still arrest Assange if he steps out of the embassy.

    Anonymous took down the Web sites for the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office and the Prime Minister. Like most Anonymous protests, the main goal is to draw attention to the issue. The government isn’t going to give Assange a free ride just because Anonymous hacked a couple of Web sites.

    While the fight is taking place in the UK, it was started in Sweden. Anonymous is hoping to rile up the citizenry of Sweden to demand that the authorities stop their campaign against Assange. They took down the site for Primavi (it’s still down) and defaced it with a message and the YouTube video of Assange’s speech from the embassy.

    As of this writing, the UK sites are all back up and functioning properly. There appears to be a countdown clock pointing to when Anonymous will resume their DDoS attacks, however, so expect the sites to go back down in about 5 hours. Like I said, it won’t do them any good as far as influencing the outcome of all of this. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes out of a meeting of South and Central American countries later this week.

  • Anonymous Probably Didn’t Hack The PSN Again

    Here we go again.

    The Twitter feed for YourAnonNews just alerted everybody to a PasteBin dump that claims to have hacked the PSN. The guy behind it says that he’s not on Twitter, Facebook or IRC. I’ve never heard of an Anonymous member not on IRC, but let’s indulge him for now.

    Here’s the statement from the alleged hacker on PasteBin:

    Think outside the box.

    I am a man with no name, I’m the man behind Anonymous, hence “master & card visa takedown in 2010”

    FBI, will you seize the innocent doors,or a devil behind that door whos staring right at’cha?

    I got no twitter,facebook, neither I go in IRC.. if someone takes credit for this pwnage, he’s a faggot.

    What’s the target?…It’s SONY, MOTHERF*CKER.

    The hacker claims to have the entire PSN database of 10 million accounts. What’s strange is that there were over 70 million accounts compromised in last year’s attack. Regardless, he says that the entire thing is sized at 50 GB and is willing to give it to anybody who emails him.

    The PasteBin dump includes a list of alleged usernames, passwords and email addresses for a number of users. The usernames and passwords are all encrypted, while the email addresses are not.

    If true, this would be the second time that Sony’s PSN has been hacked by Anonymous. The first time saw the service go down around the world for more than a month as Sony worked to get everything back up.

    Kotaku points out that the PasteBin list is similar to one from a few months back. The dump contained credentials for people working at Universal Music Group. Add to that the fact that the suspected hacker gets the number of PSN accounts wrong, and you have a troll trying to get a rile out of people.

    For now, it looks like this is all just a ruse to get a reaction out of PSN gamers. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to change your password, but it looks fake for now.

    UPDATE: Shane Bettenhausen at Sony just told Kotaku that Anonymous’ claim is “totally fake.” You can go back to playing your games now.

  • Somebody Wants Anonymous To Hack The Curiosity Mars Rover

    The Curiosity Mars Rover landing is one of the most significant engineering and scientific events of the year. The guys at NASA are super proud and we are all lucky to see the beautiful photos it’s sending back. It seems like nothing could go wrong, right?

    PC Magazine is reporting that a rogue element is requesting members of Anonymous to join in on his latest escapade – hacking the NASA control center that’s in charge of Curiosity. Suitably, the person is going by the name of “MarsCuriosity” and has been asking Anonymous members in Madrid, Spain or Cabarra for help.

    So what exactly does he want to do? For now, he wants to “isolate the huge control signal used for the Mars Odyssey/Curiosity system.” He needs the “base frequency and recordings/feed for the huge signal going out.” He says that the signal being sent to Curiosity can be “spoofed both ways.” That could either mean that he wants to send NASA bogus video footage or send bogus instructions to Curiosity. Either way, it wouldn’t be good.

    As PC Magazine points out, however, MarsCuriosity may not even be a member of Anonymous. He could just be somebody looking to make a name for himself and he wants to enlist members of Anonymous into the operation. They also point out that it’s unlikely such a hack would ever take place even if he were to get help from a few members within Anonymous.

    It’s still a strange what-if kind of scenario. Hacking is commonplace now and it’s only a matter of time before something big happens. The media coverage that the Curiosity has received thus far makes it a perfect target for a hacker hoping to get famous. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that though. I would like to think that members within Anonymous would have enough smarts to not mess with NASA or the advancement of science for something shallow like fame.

  • Anonymous Announces #OpAnonTrademark In Retaliation To French eBay Store

    Anonymous Announces #OpAnonTrademark In Retaliation To French eBay Store

    Well, that didn’t take long. Earlier today, we brought you a story of how one French retailer had trademarked the Anonymous logo for his own use. He is using the faceless man logo and the slogan on a variety of t-shirts at the moment, but that could expand to other products. I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before Anonymous caught wind of it and took to action, but I didn’t expect it to take off so fast.

    But take off fast it did. Anonymous just announced Operation AnonTrademark via the group’s French branch. The original video detailing the operation was in French, but it has now been translated into English by the U.S. branch to start a global campaign against Early Flicker.

    Here’s the transcript of their message to Early Flicker:

    “Anonymous logo and slogan has been defiled and registered through the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). An online t-shirt company online called “Early Flicker” or “E-flicker” has registered the anonymous slogan and logo and passed it on as their own. Now under French law the company owns the rights to the anonymous logo and slogan.

    In a response the National Institute of Industrial Property said that “the conditions seem fulfilled since the mark is registered and it does not seem to have made ​​use.”

    Their arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go unpunished. Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet and the ninety-nine percent will not stop until the registration has been revoked and a public apology has been made.

    The name of Anonymous will not be the whore of the world.”

    I haven’t seen Anonymous this angry at a single entity in a while. They have already started posting the personal details, including phone number, address, personal email address, and Google+/Facebook accounts of the man behind Early Flicker, Apollinaire Auffret. There also seems to be plans to launch a massive DDoS campaigns against Early Flicker’s Web sites.

    I spoke to some members of Anonymous on the matter and they said that they would have no problem if Early Flicker was just selling Anonymous t-shirts. Their problem is that Anonymous has already registered the logo and slogan under a Creative Commons license. For Early Flicker to trademark it as his own creation is illegal. That being said, they still love the people that make Anonymous merchandise using the CC license.

    It looks like this operation isn’t going to be over anytime soon. It will be interesting to see how Early Flicker responds. If its found that they have trademarked a Creative Commons licensed image, that could spell trouble for him.