WikiLeaks is at it again with their "Vault 7" releases. This time part of the dump features a nice little took kit for continued exploitation of some Linux systems. The tool kit is called OutlawCountry and is, to be perfectly honest, not much more than a remote management, monitoring and exfiltration tool. It is intended to run in the background on a system after a vulnerability has been exploited to allow the payload to be pushed. It looks very similar to a tool that the NSA used for years and has now become the commercial product Kaseya.

Cast your mind back to mid-2009 and the now infamous Pirate Bay trial. If you remember this was a landmark case in the country of Sweden simply because it was out of pattern based on the Sweden’s laws and the way they had done business. The Pirate Bay founders were all found guilty despite not actually having hosted a single file on any of their servers and not having violated the existing laws in Sweden. However, due to having a judge that was an active member of a copyright protection group and a lead investigator that was trying hard to secure a job with a motion picture company the table was already set and the Pirate Bay gang was bound to be found guilty.

The whistle blowing site WikiLeaks has finally stepped over an imaginary line and annoyed Anonymous their one time protector. Although there has been rumblings in the community about the direction that WikiLeaks was heading in the collective was always ready to defend the site and by-proxy its owner Julian Assange. The straw that finally broke the relationship was the creation of a “paywall” that required you to donate or to share content from the site before allowing you to get to the rest of the site. The donations were not just intended to maintain the site either, but to support site owner Julian Assange and his mounting legal bills and living expenses. 

Gottfrid Svartholm has been detained for a tax hack over at a Swedish IT company Logica. Previous rumors ended up being true in this case and he was indeed accused of taking part in hacking Logica and leaking thousands of tax numbers. He was arrested in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. He was taken captive there and was extradited back to Sweden last Monday. According to laws, since his visa was expired, he could have chosen to stay in Cambodia if he wanted or go back, but authorities didn’t give him any choice.

WikiLeaks was having a bad time of it about a week ago when the group AntiLeaks popped up on the scene seemingly out of nowhere and started hammering them and their mirrors with a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. When the news hit that the site was under attack many jumped to the conclusion that it was a state sponsored attack. At least people did until AntiLeaks claimed responsibility through someone that uses the name Diet Pepsi. This led to a merry round of speculation about the group and who they really were. We covered this news from the angle of the technology involved and came up with a good case for the use or Torrent Blocking technology that has popped up on the scene.

It seems that WikiLeaks has managed to get itself back online despite the continued pounding form a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack that reached bandwidth gobbling heights of 10Gb/s. The group claiming responsibility has taken to calling themselves AntiLeaks. They claim that they are attacking the site because WikiLeaks founder and own Julian Assange is avoiding justice by hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK and has nothing to do with the release of Stratfor documents detailing a new monitoring technology developed by former CIA employees under the corporate name Abraxis.

Anon has something of a reputation (like you did not know that). Its reputation is often enough to put fear into people or corporations. So when Anonymous put out a call on their IRC channel targeting PayPal and asking for a mass walkout. Many people left, we would be willing to wager that many of these left because they were scared of Anon hacking the internet bank (yes PayPal is a bank). Of course you have to wonder about why Anon would target PayPal in the first place… Well that is a pretty long story.