Anonymous hackers strike back against governments of Egypt, Yemen

By Andrew Couts February 3, 2011

Shadowy “hacktivist” group Anonymous retaliated against the governments of Egypt and Yemen this week in a show of support for antigovernment protesters in those Middle Eastern countries.

According to a report in The New York Times, about 500 Anonymous hackers managed to shut down the websites of Egypt’s Ministry of Information, as well as that of embattled President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The website take-downs come just a day after Egypt’s Internet service provers brought the country back online after a five-day Internet and mobile phone blackout. It also follows simlar Anonymous-credited attacks on the websites of the Tunisian government, which fell due to uprisings earlier last month.

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“We want freedom,” Anonymous spokesman Gregg Housh tells the Times about why the group is launching the digital attacks. “It’s as simple as that. We’re sick of oppressive governments encroaching on people.”

Anonymous followed up the Egypt attacks late Wednesday by taking down the websites of Yemen’s Ministry of Information, as well as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, reports Gawker. The strike coincides with a “day of rage” protest in Yemen meant to mimic the protests that have engulfed Egypt over the past week.

The loose-knit hacker group, which originated on website 4chan.org, first came into the national spotlight after it launched successful attacks on Paypal.com and the corporate websites of Visa and Master Card, to show its support for WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange. These attacks prompted an investigation into Anonymous by the FBI.

While the WikiLeaks attacks made major headlines worldwide, Anonymous’ most recent round has taken a back seat to the bloody uprising on the ground in Egypt, where protesters continue to face violent opposition from allegedly pro-Mubarak activists.

The hacker group has managed, however, to become part of a bigger story about the role of technology in times of political upheaval.

Both Twitter and Facebook have played crucial parts in helping protesters get their stories out to the rest of the world. And Google even created a custom Speak2Tweet service, which allowed Egyptians to phone-in Twitter updates while the country remained in the digital dark.

Regardless of Anonymous’ impact on the future of the Arab people it supports, it’s obvious that the online realm has become the new battlefield of the 21st Century, where fights between citizen and government can truly be won or lost.

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Computing

Anonymous releases counter-hacking manual

lulzsec wages war with anonymous and 4chan releases 62000 logins

With Lulz Security now on permanent hiatus, fellow hacker group Anonymous has filled in the gap with the release of a "counter-cyberterrorism" manual from the US Department of Homeland Security. According to ABC News, which was first to sort through the 650 MB file posted to MegaUpload, the release was originally thought to have come from a certain private security firm whose website went offline soon after Anonymous released the data. It was later found that the information actually comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which originally produced the "Counter Terrorism Defense Initiative" training program in 2009. Accordring to the program's website (which has since been taken offline), the "SENTINAL" program — short for "Security and Network Training Initiative and National Education Laboratory" — "is a national initiative to educate technical personnel in cyberterrorism response and prevention." The program was intended for employees of "public safety, law enforcement, state and local government, public utilities, colleges and universities, and health care providers." And it "focuses on enhancing the prevention, preparedness, and response capabilities of local, state, tribal, and rural public safety jurisdictions."It does not appear that the release contains much that wasn't already publicly available on the Internet. It does, however, provide a list of all the Federal Bureau of Investigation office locations throughout the United States. Other contents of note include stock letters for officially requesting user information from Internet service providers, and various hacking and coutner-hacking tools. In short, there's really nothing much here that a determined person couldn't have found without hacking a single thing.
Regardless of the value of the release, the action shows that the hackers are far from finished. This release is part of the "AntiSec" (anti-cybersecurity) campaign launched by Anonymous and LulzSec (before it disbanded). According to @AnonymousIRC, a 100,000-follower strong Twitter feed that reports on the group's escapades, "all @LulzSec members" are onboard with the #AntiSec campaign. While LulzSec claims that it planned from the beginning to remain a coherent group for 50 days before splitting up, some believe the hacker sect called it quits after a rival gang of hackers, A-Team, released what it claims are the identities and online properties of all of LulzSec's members.

Computing

Sony PS3 hacker George ‘GeoHot’ Hotz ‘works for Facebook’

geohot-facebook-george-hotz

Just when you thought the massive hacker stories were over for the evening, another twist comes in: Hacker George 'GeoHot' Hotz, who recently settled a lawsuit with Sony for publishing a PlayStation 3 crack online, now works for Facebook, according to various sources. His exact position with the company is unclear, but he may be on a the development team tasked wit building the social network's rumored new iPad app.
The rumor of Hotz's break into "legitimate" product development comes first from jailbreak hacker Joshua Hill (aka p0isixNinja), who said in a recent interview that Hotz had made the move. Hill reportedly challenged Hotz to a iPad 2 jailbreak duel. (Both hackers come from an iOS-cracking background.) Hotz declined, saying that he wanted to remain out of the attention of the media after the debacle with Sony.
Gabe Rivera, creator of news aggregator Techmeme, said that he noticed on Hotz's Facebook page a message that reads, "Facebook is really an amazing place to work…first hackathon over." Hotz reportedly published that post on June 17, but he is said to have worked at Facebook since May.
Hotz has become somewhat of a symbol for the hacking community. Hacktivist group Anonymous launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Sony in April as retribution for suing Hotz. Coincidentally or not, the DDoS onslaught came at the same time as a monstrous breach of Sony's PlayStation Network put the personal data of as much as 100 million people worldwide at risk.
Those hacks became the preface to an ongoing campaign by Lulz Security, who hacked Sony in a variety of ways. The group later went on to attack everyone from PBS to the CIA. By chance, LulzSec announced tonight that it was disbanding, and would never perform another cyberattack under the LulzSec pirate flag again. There is so far no evidence that GeoHot going corporate has anything to do with LulzSec's sudden death.
Watch the interview with Hill and Craig Fox, founder of My Great Fest jailbreak convention:

Computing

LulzSec wages war with Anonymous and 4Chan, releases 62,000 logins [update]

lulzsec-vs-anonymous

The rascally hackers of Lulz Security have unleashed pure havoc on the entire Internet today with the release of 62,000 email-password combos that serve as the login credentials for, well, we're not exactly sure — the group, better known as LulzSec, won't say explicitly. But so far Twitter users have reported hacked Gmail, PayPal, Facebook, Hotmail and Twitter accounts related to the stolen data, so it appears that nothing's safe if you're unlucky enough to have made the list.
The lulz seem to be going both ways with this one: good and nauseatingly bad. While at least one user reports having received an email chocked full of child pornography, others have gotten (un-earned) super-boosts to their World of Warcraft accounts (at the expense of someone else, of course). All-in-all, it would seem LulzSec's shenanigans are going precisely according to plan.
In addition to the leak, LulzSec has begun to take shots at an unlikely target: 4Chan.org and its infamous /b/ message board. 4Chan is famously the original home of another hacker group, Anonymous, and is the source of a wide variety of popular Internet memes, like LolCats and Rick Rolling.
According to VentureBeat, the moves against 4Chan began after LulzSec kicked-off a "DDoS party" on a variety of websites and game servers popular with gamers, including that of EVE Online, League of Legends and Minecraft, all of which faced outages or major slow-downs because of the flood of malicious traffic.
Visitors to 4Chan's /v/ imageboard, whose users focus on video games, caught wind of the attacks, and began their own DDoS campaign against anything related to LulzSec.
Today, LulzSec continued the civil war of the online underground with a series of tweets meant to provoke 4Chan visitors.
"Everybody visit this cool and edgy imageboard, they love new members!" wrote LulzSec on its 150,000-follower-strong Twitter feed, with a link to /b/. "Ask them how to triforce and how to become legion." LulzSec followed this up with a variety of other tweets drawing attention to /b/, with suggestions for how to annoy its regular users.
It may seem odd to some that LulzSec would hit so close to Anonymous' home, seeing as they are both hacker groups that have hit similar targets. (Or, in the case of Sony, the same target.) But LulzSec has consistently denied any relation to Anonymous. And now, it seems, the two groups are at war*.
"We are the concentrated success of 2005 /b/, being ‘hunted’ by the 2011 furry horde. Challenge accepted, losers," Anonymous posted to its Twitter account.
At the beginning of this writting, 4Chan either failed to load or loaded extremely slowly, a sign that a DDoS attack was underway. By the the time of publication, the site was running smoothly.
UPDATE: *Both Anonymous and LulzSec have denied that they are at war. "Saying we're attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we're going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger," said LulzSec on Twitter early Friday afternoon. The Anonymous-associated Twitter feed YourAnonNews furthered that assertion, saying, "We are NOT at war with @LulzSec."