Politically motivated attacks reach back at least as far as 2001, when a U.S. Navy plane landed on Hainan Island in China. A Chinese hacking group named "Honker Union" attacked U.S. websites in the days that followed.These the tit for tat attacks against Wikileaks and those whom support Assange have a colossal chance to bring this street brawl to a planetary viral cyber war,should things continue to escalate.
Today while the 'court jester' (Julian Assange) stayed in jail, his followers and fellow hackers rushed to his defense and attacked feverishly in the cyber world. Undoubtedly Assange had a detailed premeditated process for what to do in his absence or of his demise.
Internet "hacktivists" operating under the label "Operation Payback" claimed responsibility in a Twitter message for causing severe technological problems at the website for MasterCard, Visa, and a Swiss bank which pulled the plug on its relationship with WikiLeaks a day ago.
Per Hellqvist, a security specialist with the firm Symantec, said a network of web activists called Anonymous — to which Operation Payback is affiliated — appeared to be behind many of the attacks. The group, which has previously focused on the Church of Scientology and the music industry, is knocking offline websites seen as hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks.
Operation Payback said today "While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons," the group said in a statement. "We want transparency and we counter censorship ... we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."
Julian Assanges' hacking career goes deep as in 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax," or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information".
In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, and other organizations, via modem. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100. The prosecutor said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers".
Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."
The attacks are being conducted with a tool called "LOIC." Which allows a volunteer to simply enter the name of a website to join an attack. The volunteer’s Internet connection is then routed through a "command and control" server, which amplifies the number of requests being sent to the target website from that volunteer's computer, eventually overwhelming the Web server.
LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) is a network stress testing application, written in C# and developed by "praetox". It attempts a denial-of-service attack on the target site by flooding the server with TCP packets, UDP packets, or HTTP requests with the intention of disrupting the service of a particular host.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
NFTOS Editor in Chief Roger West who is CISSP {Certified Information System Security Professional} certified, estimates that it took about 5,000 volunteers to topple MasterCard today.
The pro-WikiLeaks vengeance campaign on Wednesday appeared to be taking the form of the destructive cyber war tool for hackers titled "denial-of-service attack"
DoS attack or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) which is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. The term is generally used with regards to computer networks, but is not limited to this field.which are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations. Often DoS attacks computers that are harnessed — sometimes surreptitiously — to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.
It should be know surprise that the cyber attack community is siding with Assange. Surely the "Operation Payback" clan has several copies of Assanges" book on their shelves. “Underground: Tales of Hacking.” Assange is no dummy when it comes to computers and programming as in
1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. Starting in 1994, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTP Cache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines.
Futurist have worried for years about the coming era of cyber wars. The future has now arrived. Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke has written a recent book on the topic, warning of the prospect of a "cyber Pearl Harbor." The future of cyber war is likely to be as asymmetric as the future of conventional war.
This all out cyber war runs deep with emotions, and runs the full gambit of US and international law. Assange and fellow hackers have surrendered their moral high ground a long time ago. Twitter, Facebook, Sarah Palin, and PayPal are said to be next on the hit list of cyber ground attacks.
Cablegate and Assange are devolving into a "Wiki-War". The WikiLeaks - Wikiwar drama is indeed a cyber war. The cyber arms war race underway now is almost irreversible, and maybe Nations and organizations need to create "cyber war treaties". With Assange in jail, the cyber world can only expect these attacks to escalate. As online attacks become more frequent, the price of cyber security will continue to rise in the cat and mouse game hackers continue to play with each other.
Wiki War is a true and pure indication of how technology will play an increasingly central role in future conflicts.
NFTOS expects a laundry list of targets. "They'll research security vulnerabilities on a website. They've defaced websites in the past so we expect to see all sorts of things coming in the future."
Footnote: U.S. agencies have warned some employees that reading the classified State Department documents released by WikiLeaks puts them at risk of losing their jobs. U.S. colleges warn students to not comment on, post links to WikiLeaks on social media sites saying that statements may affect chances of getting security clearance for government jobs.
NFTOS
