I get the impression reading some of the blogs that some of the arrests recently have in fact picked up people who were 'known' to other people who might very well become somewhat more cautious.
Which kinda makes me grin and roll my eyes at the same time.
You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.
LulzSec isn't anything new, this kind of hacking has been going on since the 80s - they've just taken a different approach with the media. And snitching is always how hacker groups fall.
This is essentially how all law enforcement investigations work, actually. Drugs, hacking, graffiti, white collar crime, whatever. Get a good snitch and you'll get the whole organization eventually.
Everyone succumbs (snitches) with the right encouragement (threat)
Catch a weak link, offer them a deal in exchange for information that leads to the conviction of someone higher up in the organization, repeat until you make it to the top.
I'd think the FBI would in on it too.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/20/arrests-lulzsec-a...
Not a good time to be a hacktivist
A criminal is a rigidly-defined adjective meaning an entity which breaks or broke laws.
An activist is a rigidly-defined term meaning an entity which acts to further some idea and bring it to public perception.
A hacktivist isn't well-defined, but we'll assume here that it's a form of activist.
Now based on this, the Anonymous and Lulzsec hackers were hacktivists, at least according to their own statements of their intent. They also were criminals, at least according to my reading of the laws of the US. Now, what you may be looking for is whether they were ethically good --- but don't conflate lawfulness with morality, that's worked out poorly in both directions.
But of course, you acknowledge that this is a horribly simplistic view of things. Even DnD got this, after all (clearly Anon is Chaotic, and whether it's Neutral or Good depends on whom you talk to).
So perhaps you might say "I don't believe Anon's actions were for the good", or even "weren't well-intentioned", but please recognize that passing judgement beyond noting the factual statement that they are criminals, is a personal judgement. Not that personal opinions shouldn't be argued, defended, and spread --- just that they should not be conflated with fact.
> They're criminals.
The civil rights movement has been historically full of criminals. Lets question the legitimacy of all their claims!
It's not. It's much more complicated than that.
- obvious digital connection (forgot to use tor / ipredator / hacked vpn)
- timing attacks (keeping normal waking hours for his home country, using a vpn instead of tor)
- word frequency attacks (since he wrote a lot of press releases, his word choices may have been cross correlated with a personal blog)
- bragging to a friend
- getting flagged after showing up at a political/high-suspicion meet up (which might be enough to allow for a timing attack)
- voice analysis from interviews he did w/o a voice transformer being matched to other audio
- opsec blunders (loose lips when talking to press / on IRC / wherever anon talks)
Anyone else have any guesses?
* setup numerous honeypot open proxies and tor gateways
* work with journalists to have all emails and communications forwarded
* isolate ddos clients and reverse-engineer command and control. surprisingly many of these trojans are poorly written and have security holes themselves
* setup numerous fake twitter profiles and provoking them into responses - things like posting images, replying, etc.
* setup fake hacker groups. stage defacements etc. in order to get in touch with them
* I would write a system that tracks and stores every bit of communication they make and plot out their social communication graphs and when they are talking, who to, etc.
* ask ISP's or proxy providers to grep for traffic patterns.
* get user-agent info from twitter, or provoke them into visiting a link, and possibly load malware. no browser is really safe in a targetted attack
* word/speech tracing. this is why 1337 5p34k was invented, so you can not be traced via your vocab/grammar/spelling/phrases etc. it doesn't take a large sample to start narrowing it down
probably more - haven't really thought about it, but when i did see that they started using twitter I gave them 3-4 months, tops.
One of the better broadsheet newspapers here in the UK had an article on Lulzsec/Anonymous, and one of the best comments they made was:
"Hackers fear other hackers more than law enforcement."
In this community it seems there is no honour amongst thieves. I very much suspect they grabbed a bunch of people around the world who were less talented at hiding themselves, and one of them knew enough to plea bargain in return for information.
I'm not sure what your point is here.
Our governments have no comprehension or understanding of the prospects or implications that the internet has on modern civilization. When an individual can take down an organizations method of operation (mastercard/visa/paypal), it isn't the individuals fault (regardless of their actions) it is the organizations fault.
You don't blame someone for stealing from a bank when they pile gold bullion in the entrance without a guard in sight. You blame the bank because that's fucking stupid.
Being able to dDOS mastercard isn't the individuals fault, it's mastercards. I've never heard of someone dDOSing Google, why? Because Google only makes money when people access it and their system can support insane amounts of instantaneous traffic. It's a simple fact that sooner or later mastercard/visa would have been taken down by a normal traffic spike.
Is it the users fault when mastercard gets dDOS'd by a few million people placing midnight orders on Black Friday?
Seriously, look at the world rationally. If I can spend $5 on a padlock, it's my fault when someone steals my $500 BBQ from my back yard. Someone committed a crime, yes, but I'm going to be buying a padlock like I should have in the first place.
Why didn't mastercard/visa/paypal/sony/sony/sony/(sony x 27 fucking times) front the goddamn cash so they wouldn't lose hundreds of thousands.
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Now we have Topiary. Probably the lamest one of the bunch. He doesn't
actually do anything except give interviews. There are plenty of logs of
him all over the internet being a complete idiot. His "d0x" are all over
the internet also. He tries to deny it but there are logs of him bitching
about being d0x'ed int he #hq logs that Laurelai leaked.
Name: Daniel Ackerman Sandberg
Location: SwedenFrank Abagnale Jr. comes to mind.
The people who are worth catching for the sake of their minds ... don't get caught. At least not nearly as easily as this group.
Yes, it was the only realistic part of the movie. It is a bit frightening to be woken up by a man pointing a shotgun in your face when you are 13.
IIRC, there was a well known NYC hacker who was getting ready for school, and was in the shower, when the SS burst in and the scene was loosely based on him.
>One important feature of a conspiracy charge is that it relieves prosecutors of the need to prove the particular roles of conspirators. If two persons plot to kill another (and this can be proven), and the victim is indeed killed as a result of the actions of either conspirator, it is not necessary to prove with specificity which of the conspirators actually pulled the trigger.[1]
I'd assume English law has something equivalent -- it's a really old problem, and involving computers won't change the principles involved.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#Conspira...
I suppose teenagers enjoy more freedom in Europe, maybe it's more appropriate there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/27/lulzsec-hac...
The source is the Metropolitan Police Service of London, a.k.a. Scotland Yard.