A cyber battle offensive called Operation Payback, launched by a hacker group called "Anonymous," is targeting corporations who have taken action in opposition to WikiLeaks. Anonymous "hacktivists" attacked MasterCard and Visa Wed, shortly after those companies quit processing donations made to WikiLeaks through their sites. Operation Payback works by amassing hacktivists into a voluntary botnet that renders sites useless by inundating them with data.
Distributed denial of service hacktivism going on with Operation Payback
Hacktivism is what is happening with Operation Payback. There are a huge amount of attacks with distributed denial of service, or DDoS. Becoming "hacktivists" is the suggestion the hacker group Anonymous suggests anybody with a computer and internet ought to do. A free download of the assault tool LOIC is even being offered. Installing the LOIC assault tool links a computer to a voluntary botnet that saturates targeted websites with a flood of data. Thurs morning it was noted that the LOIC had already been downloaded too often. Over 31,000 downloads occurred. DDoS attacks with the LOIC botnet brought on sites like MasterCard and Visa to shut down Wednesday. Anonymous hacktivists also altered MasterCard’s Wikipedia entry to read “MasterCard is an evil puppet of the United States government.”
Anonymous guards WikiLeaks
Other Distributed denial of service attacks were done by Anonymous before. These included law firms suing music and video pirates, Gene Simmons of KISS and the Church of Scientology. Releasing the LOIC attack tool wasn't the only thing Anonymous did. It also makes 1,000 copies of the WikiLeaks content on mirror sites. Also, the hacktivist group put the content from WikiLeaks on "dark net." This is where information could be accessed but not traced due to heavily encrypted layers of web. The next target for Anonymous is rumored to be Amazon.com, which pulled WikiLeaks off its United States machines last week at the request of the federal govt.
An anonymous, formidable foe
It doesn't cost anything and is easy to launch attacks like Operation Payback. Defending in opposition to Distributed denial of service attacks is expensive though. It isn't easy either. As much as $10,000 a month for cyber security systems that will stop them are what large companies will pay. Cyber security claims that the attacks from Operation payback are really pretty small. Less than 10 gigabits per second of data is being transferred. It is harder to defend in opposition to the attacks that Anonymous gives. This is as the computer the assault comes from is constantly rotated. Many of Operation Payback websites were actually shut down themselves Wed because of a counterattack.
Info from
NPR
marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/08/pm-hacktivism-can-be-pricey-for-businesses/
ABC News
abcnews.go.com/US/operation-payback-anonymous-cyber-battle-erupts-wikileaks/story?id=12351428
BBC News
bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11957367
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