Displaying items by tag: Anonymous

FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) comes in many forms. The most common is through the use of the News (printed and internet) here as hundreds of millions of people consume content from multiple sources the seeds of misinformation can be sewn with relative ease. Over the past few months we have seen the NSA, the FBI, Fox News, Symantec and others start to pain the Anonymous (and other) online movement as villains. The FBI, CIA and NSA have even begun the campaign to throw them into the same category as terrorists. Most of these have not met with success as more and more people are beginning to read between the lines of the daily news, but it still has an impact.

In a very interesting twist on the Occupy movement Subpoenas are being issued demanding information relating to many of the Websites that related to the Occupy cause. One of the Subpoenas that was posted on Scribd.com is asking for quite a bit of information including “Any and all documents and records relating to the following articles posted on the Website including records of the IP addresses and pseudo names of the blog posters.”

There is an article going around the internet (again coming from CNet) that has an alleged former Anonymous member making the claim that she identified who Sabu really was back in February. What makes this claim even more interesting is that the person, Jennifer Emick, also claims that she made the information public through Backtrace Security in March, but was told to take the information down by the FBI. Backtrace further claims that they were in communication with the “Feds” but were not privy to the information that Sabu had turned on the Collective and was giving up names.

Only days ago we published an article telling you that you would begin to see more and more news relating to the only activist movement (which includes Anonymous, but is not limited to Anonymous) and how it is dangerous, related to terrorism and even how collectives like Anonymous and other organizations are duping the people wanting to contribute. Well this morning while having our coffee we watch in amusement as a cable news channel featured a US Senator talking about how the “hacktivist” movement is second only to terrorism as a threat to national security.

In what has to be one of the most unusual “Get-The-Vote-Out” campaigns that I have personally seen it appears that Anonymous and the Occupy group are urging people to hold politicians accountable for their actions by voting them out of office.  While some in the media are calling this a first it is not the in reality. In multiple messages Anonymous has called on the public to hold their political leaders accountable. Their methods might be different at times, but this is also the beginning of the voting season in the US so the move really comes as no surprise.

In the very recent past the NSA and other governmental agencies have tried to show Anonymous as a terrorist organization. To do this they are using very basic definitions of the term; after all a terrorist uses fear to achieve their goals. However, if you can qualify Anonymous as a terrorist organization based on the loose definition and the fact that fear of them uncovering the truth has led to changes in many areas then you can also classify the MPAA, RIAA, NSA and other organizations as terrorist too.

The National Security Agency has just released a report to the powers that be in the US that expresses concern that the online activist group Anonymous could go after the US power grid in the next 3-5 years (we told you things like this would happen). This report was put together by their counter terrorism group and while it lacked any details in the body of the report (like the axis for attack) and forgot to mention there are other people out there that would like to do this (like foreign countries and real Terrorists) it does raise some real concerns.

The online activist collective known as Anonymous has undergone a lot of changes in the years that is has been around. We have followed them and covered some of their highlights (and some of their blunder). They provide an interesting commentary on society and the internet. In a time when it has been commented that the media controls the information and governments are abusing their power, they almost act like a policing body. This is not to say that the activities of their members are always honest and forthright, in fact there are times when members of the collective do things that are appalling. However, we are seeing them bring some corporate and governmental practices into the open.

Anonymous is preparing to “shut off the internet” on March 31st. The move is in protest to things like SOPA, ACTA, and according to their statement; “irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun”. Now while Anonymous typically goes after targets with something along the lines of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack they are looking to do something different here. Anonymous plans to take all 13 Root DNS servers offline in a single day. Is this possible? Well let’s take a look at some of the facts behind how DNS works and some evidence that Anonymous might already have broken into the system.

It looks like Anonymous has succeeded in taking down the website of the CIA. After announcing a tweet at #YourAnonNews stating that the CIA site was about to go down at around 4:14pm the collective appears to have made good on its threat and announced that the site was officially down at 4:45PM.

It looks like this might be a DNS redirect as the IP that CIA.gov resolves to appear to be from the UK and will not resolve on any reverse lookups... More to follow.