Angles On Anonymous

A number of readers are sending in links related to Anonymous, the Internet phenomenon — don't call them a group — behind the controversial DDoS attacks on commercial entities that fail to support WikiLeaks. The best insight into Anonymous comes from the Economist's Babbage blogger, who hung out in one of their IRC channels. Reader nk497 points out that UK users looking to join Anonymous's DDoS army should be aware they could face a jail term of up to two years; simply downloading the LOIC software used in the DDoSing could suffice to earn a conviction. One 16-year-old has been arrested in The Netherlands and is charged with participating in the DDoS. Reader ancientribe sends in coverage of a claim by one security outfit that several existing criminal botnets have joined forces with Anonymous's Operation: Payback. And reader Stoobalou notes a Thinq.co.uk story on a manifesto of sorts that purports to come from "ANON OPS," even though Anonymous disclaims any central spokesperson or entity (press release here, PDF).

Not this s**t again

[TideX]

I am so sick of hearing about /b/. Its not that I'm against wikileaks or julian assange, I'm all for freedom of speech and transparent government. I'm against how everyone misuses the name Anonymous constantly. They are not the only board on 4chan for gods sake. Every time the media focuses on them it makes the rest of us look like idiots. For the record pretty much every other board on 4chan is against this nonsense. Anonymous is not a terrorist organization, its just a name nothing more. Anyone wearing a Guy Fawkes mask doesn't know the first damn thing about freedom and just follows the trend of his fellow /b/tards and its been this way since project chanology. Conformism and ignorance is the very thing were against. Theres no reason why they do it except maybe for some false sense of righteousness. They disgrace our name and our website. Call them /b/tards, terrorists, idiots, but not Anonymous. That name belongs to us and were sick of being grouped with them.

Re:Good idea, crappy implementation ..... and

[unity100]

A) It does absolutely nothing to help Wikileaks. It's just a revenge tactic. The decisions have been made.

it does.

paypal was at frist blabbering about 'tos violation' regarding wikileaks cut-off. after what anonymous did, they have come up saying that they did it due to political pressure.

other companies will probably follow suit or take similar routes to unload responsibility. this will put the blame where it lies.

this, if anything, is much more important in that it will make it clear that censorship is being attempted by politicians.

Israel....

[mrops]

Maybe a bit off topic, but still related to wikileaks,

Notice how there is nothing incriminating about Israel in these leaks...

Turns out Israel struck a deal with Wikileaks.. brilliant. Wonder if US could have done the same.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-struck-a-deal-with-israel-over-cable-leaks/ [veteranstoday.com]

Re:Download LOIC ? hahahahaha

[VortexCortex]

You managed to cause 5 requests in the course of about 5 seconds, whereas LOIC can do that tenfold.

50 requests in the course of about 5 seconds? That's 10 requests a second... a puny (and false) figure.

Meh, just hold ctrl while clicking the links to those sites as fast as possible.

Then, click: Bookmarks > Bookmark all tabs.

Then use the "Open all in tabs" option multiple times. Then right click the tab bar and select: "Reload all Tabs". I can easily use Firefox to generate hundreds of requests per second; This is still very small amount of traffic.

My hardware can send more than 1 packet per 10 milliseconds, but we'll go with that nice round number.

A true DDoS attack works by sending spoofed SYN packets to many servers while including the target IP as the spoofed "origin" IP. Then, one machine can cause many hundreds of machines to send the target "syn-ack" packets. One attacker is distributing the denial of service flood attack, hence the name: DDoS.

When an "ack" packet is not received, the TCP protocol states that multiple "syn-ack" packets should be sent -- one spoofed "syn" and we generate 5 or more "syn-ack" packets. Spoof a hundred TCP syn packets a second and you easily generate 500 or more distributed packets per second. 100 spoofed packets per second to 2000 different IPs in a rolling list, remember, one syn gets you 5 syn-acks from that host, spoof a few syns, move to the next.

Get a large number of machines to do this type of DDoS attack and it can generate an order of magnitude more traffic than just the network itself can produce... very devastating, much more so than reloading browser pages. 50 machines can produce 25,000 packets per second directed at one IP.

Re:Israel....

[Anonymous Coward]

... you're joking.

1) that same site is also convinced wikileaks is IN ITS ENTIRETY a usa plot to police the internet. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/10/wikileaks-a-big-dangerous-us-government-con-job/ - money graf: "The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet."
2) it's a 9/11 truther site.
3) the only source they have which actually suggests assange struck a deal with israel is "syriatruth.info" - very unbiased, i'm sure.

modded informative. good work, /.