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Guest post: Childish Cyber Crimes bring down 5 websites

Published by on Dec 8th, 2010, 71 Comments

Guest post by Jason Adriaan.

Last night an Internet group that goes by “Anonymous” reaped revenge against services that cut ties with Wikileaks and aggressors against Wikileaks. They took down thepaypalblog.com for 8 hours, aklagare.se (Swedish Prodecutors) for 5 hours, postfinance.ch (Swedish Bank) for 12 hours, lieberman.senate.gov and everyDNS.com. This might sound really impressive, but to be honest… it’s not.

Related:

Operation: Avenge Assange is about more than “Childish Cybercrimes”.

Great WikiLeaks resources online.

They did these attacks through the power of DDoS (Distibuted Denail of Service), which is the online equivalent of hundreds of thousands of screaming teenage girls stampeding to see Justin Bieber at your local grocery store. In layman terms how this works is a few hundred geeky (mostly teenage) guys get together and repeatedly refresh the site they are targeting, forcing the computer (server) the site is hosted on to run out of system resources. Now this sounds complicated but the truth is there is an app called the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) which does all this for you. The app hands over the power of your computer to one or two guys that coordinate the attacks or you can use the app yourself.

These DDoS attacks are illegal in most countries and have been going on for almost two weeks now between anonymous Pro- and Anti-Wikileak groups and has reached the point of just being plain childish. DDoS is as juvenile as a wedgie, it renders you temporarily discomforted but soon its over and it’s as if nothing happened.

The “Anonymous” group vowed to take down Twitter, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal in this way soon, but this will not happen. The truth is “Anonymous” is a small group of about 600 folks and attacking sites built to handle traffic that stretches into the billion page impressions is impossible no matter what type of magic software you use. This is why DDoS’ers all choose easy small websites which are not able to handle big traffic spikes as targets. This way they create alot of hype and feel all fuzzy inside for doing something teh_awesome, when in fact they are really just swimming in the kiddies pool of cyber crimes.

[Update] Ed note – Mastercard.com is now completely down due to the attacks.

(Update: Minnaar Pieters wrote his follow up article to this. He does not concur.)

(Update 2: 5 Great WikiLeaks resources online.)

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Comments

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  • Wendy

    We are so quick to dismiss teenage ‘geeks’ when what they are doing doesn’t suit us but as soon as they are entrepreneurs we all carry on about teenagers being the tech savvy business minds of our day.
    passion != immaturity
    Anyway as Gerard says, the ages of those launching these attacks are not relevant to the results

  • liamb_live

    It depends, if the DDoS disrupted services and that was the end of it then the “Payback” you refer to is minimal and as others have indicated in other comments is just a show of force and protest. If the DDoS was used to deliver payloads and disrupt network communications you may only see that these attacks were more serious in coming weeks. The PayPal blog could be hosted on the the same infrastructure that is home to key hardware components and software services and the attackers could now have access to all of these and be able to do a lot more than deny public users access to the blog. You are missing the most serious aspect of a DDoS which is that it is used as a component for exploitation and an attack is not over when the DDoS is is either prevented or stopped. Hackers use a variety of exploits to find misconfigured networks / servers or exploitable software to gain access and I view a serious DDoS attack like a battering ram that is used to try and open the doors to your network.

  • Anonymous

    Why? Its his opinion and has created a good debate…. BWTH blog is not saying this is our stance on the matter.

  • Ed

    I came here on the promise of debate and the only debate I’ve found is between the author of a badly written, poorly researched post and everyone else.

    @Jason Adriaan: Arguing over the meanings behind the words used by Anonymous (“payback” vs “protest”) is semantics and does little to cover up the fact that you have written a shoddy post, showing little to no understanding of the subject matter.

    Also, your argument that this post is not ABOUT Wikileaks isn’t helped by the fact that you mention Wikileaks throughout the post, the URL contains the word “wikileaks” and there is a giant screenshot of Wikileaks in the middle of the post.

    The highlight of this entire “debate” for me has been watching you defend your position by saying there’s no way that Anonymous would be able to take down a serious site like Master… oh wait…. Anonymous just took down a serious site like Mastercard.

  • Oba

    Could not reply earlier site would not save.

    “law” who’s law.
    “demonstrate, vote.. scream and shout..” the law is relative these activities were/are also against the law. How will/did they change?

    “crime” breaking rules that “WE” set not breakin rules that “YOU” set and change at will.

    “Childish”
    Picketing in front of an organization has the same effect and is not deemed childish. I guess you could call this a “Digital picket line” let’s hope in does not turn into a
    “Digital (riot, insurgency, rebellion, …)” and worse it may not stay Digital

  • http://twitter.com/jasonadriaan Jason Adriaan

    I did not set the url or choose the pic that was used. Err.. and the Mastercard attack has taken down the home page and none of the payment infrastructure.

  • Ed

    If you didn’t read the post, how did you know it referred to underground IRC rooms?

  • Ed

    “One payment service company told the BBC its customers were experiencing “a complete loss of service” on MasterCard SecureCode. The credit card company later confirmed that loss.”

    From an article on The Guardian

  • Anonymous

    I obviously read it after Chris referenced it again in his comment.

  • Anonymous

    Hey Oba – having Disqus commenting issues? Let me know so we can look at it.

  • http://twitter.com/jasonadriaan Jason Adriaan

    pfft

  • Pingback: How to join Wikileak’s Operation Payback! | DChetty

  • Anonymous
  • http://twitter.com/guided1 Gerard L. Petersen

    Just as a follow up (or an I told you so) seems like even Anonymous agree DDOS are not effective. Anonymous have changed Operation Payback to Operation Leakspin.

    Souce: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/10/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates 9:32

    @Ed I agreed with Jason. I just wasn’t sure on the numbers but they were confirmed. So I had to agreed with that. The other thing I didn’t agree on was the age… but like I said.. that is debatable.. nobody knows who anonymous is.. nor is it relevant to what they are doing.

  • http://twitter.com/guided1 Gerard L. Petersen

    Now they are Attacking the Dutch Police. That IS childish. The police do not rely on internet infrastructure… I as time goes on you can see that, though it may seem to be inflammatory, is closer to being factually correct than you would like to admit.

  • Colorsofdavid

    aww, you complain about 600??? where did you get that no., your head? you have no idea how many there are, and paypal consider themselves judge and executioner. in that they practise witch burning…why? bcos if you are “ALLEGED” of being criminal, you are guilty adn have to prove innocence. in other words, an innocent person can simply have a lie said about him, and paypal believes the liar, and the innocent person by natural law who is innocent until proven guilt beyond a proof burden has the burden reversed.
    that effectively means we are murderers unless we proove ourselves innocent that is the justice paypal uses. they are the worst nazis, I suspect you would be killed if these had some power like that, hitler is alive and well…..I jest not, be very afraid

  • Col

    u see yourself as a law abiding citizen and be proud of it, are u so naive to think that the powers that we allow, we who are millions, they who are few, we allow, are law abiding, the govt services? they are the liars the criminals the murderers the thieves, too. u know nothing of what goes on wise up. big business and govt can be the worst of criminals

  • http://twitter.com/jasonadriaan Jason Adriaan

    When this post was written and the attacks just started pandasecurity reported the number 600. That number clearly rose into the thousands within hours and then dramatically dropped off once people were getting frustrated and bored.

  • http://www.best-registrycleaner.net Best Registry Cleaner

    WB is a great blog because the articles are normally factual.

  • Oba

    Sorry I did not understand your comment.

  • http://www.forrestcriminallaw.com/ defense attorney Harris County

    It is sad to note that the youth are involved in cyber crimes. Taking this article as an example, it is really alarming that child sites are behind the spread of such unlawful acts throughout the web. Hopefully a more comprehensive legislation will be formulated in order to protect us from being victims of such offenses.

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