Archive for Anonymous

“Total War” Declared On Donald Trump By Anonymous

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 15, 2016 by itnerd

Anonymous has targeted US Presidential candidate Donald Trump. The Guardian has details:

The group announced its re-engagement of “OpTrump” through its traditional propaganda video, aiming to take down one of Trump’s property websites forChicago on 1 April.

Anonymous said: “We have been watching you for a long time and what we’ve seen is deeply disturbing. You don’t stand for anything but your personal greed and power.

“This is a call to arms. Shut down his websites, research and expose what he doesn’t want the public to know. We need you to dismantle his campaign and sabotage his brand.”

And:

“This is a declaration of total war. OperationTrump engaged.”

This “total war” comes after the group leaked his voice mails. Trump has come under a fair amount of scrutiny lately for all the wrong reasons, and his bombastic style isn’t helping him to avoid being a target of groups like Anonymous. Thus April 1st might be a day to circle on your calendar as it is possible that something “interesting” could happen on that day.

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Trump Voicemails Leaked By Anonymous

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 7, 2016 by itnerd

In the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump is constantly making headlines for something he’s said or done. At this point, he looks set to become the Republican candidate, assuming that he can keep his nose clean. But that seems to be changing. Anonymous declared war on him back in December when Trump announced plans to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Now we have the first shot in this war. The notorious hacker group has hacked Trumps voicemail and leaked the messages. The messages are interesting:

Leaked to Gawker the messages include some left by MSNBC journalists, thanking Trump for charitable donations. The site does offer a caveat: “While Gawker was unable to independently verify their authenticity, the recordings certainly appear to be genuine”.

And:

The voicemail also appears to include praise-filled messages from MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Tamron Hall, as well as Don King and Tom Brady.

Trump has long-presented himself as someone who has an intense dislike and distrust of what he scornfully refers to as the ‘liberal media’, so the contents of his voicemail inbox are a little surprising, putting forward a rather different image — one that he would perhaps prefer stayed hidden.

The funny thing is that Trump is known for hating the media as they tend to be too “liberal” for his tastes. This seems to go against that image. One has to wonder what else  Anonymous can dig up about Trump as they think there’s clearly stuff out there that can embarrass him.

 

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Anonymous Declares War On ISIS Because Of Paris Attacks

Posted in Commentary with tags on November 16, 2015 by itnerd

Last Friday afternoon, we in North America, not to mention the rest of the planet were sickened by the attacks on Paris France that were apparently carried out by ISIS. But it also seems that one group are going to do something about it. That group are the hacktivists known as Anonymous. The Toronto Star is reporting that they’re going after this group of terrorists:

“These attacks cannot remain unpunished,” someone in a Guy Fawkes mask says in French in video posted by the group to YouTube on Monday.

Describing members of the Islamic State as “vermin that kill poor innocents,” the Anonymous member said the hackers would track down members of the extremist group.

“We will launch the biggest operation ever against you. Expect many cyber attacks. War has been declared. Get ready,” the person said.

Now to be fair, Anonymous has declared war on ISIS before, thus this seems to be an escalation of that.

In terms of the video that is referred to in The Toronto Star article, I’ve re posted it below:

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Anonymous Threatens To Take The US “Off The Cybermap”

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 7, 2013 by itnerd

The infamous hacker group Anonymous has made a new threat. Here it is via CNBC:

“Anonymous will make sure that’s this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently you have committed war crimes in your own country,” the hackers said last month in a statement. “We will now wipe you off the cybermap. Do not take this as a warning.”

The Department of Homeland Security issued a confidential warning last week that the group, made up of mostly Middle East- and North African-based criminal hackers, was preparing to launch the cyberattacks Tuesday but said that the disruption could be limited, according to a report on the security blog Krebs on Security.

Seeing as they just made the North Koreans miserable, this likely shouldn’t be taken as an idle threat. I’m guessing that they must really be ticked off the US. The question is, how do you defend against a threat from this group? That’s a question I think we’ll soon see answered.

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Anonymous Hacks Personal Info Of Montreal F1 And Threatens Them To Protest Bill 78

Posted in Commentary with tags , , , on June 2, 2012 by itnerd

For those of you outside of Canada, Quebec students have been protesting tuition hikes for the last 100 or so days with daily and nightly protests that have sometimes turned violent. As a result, the Quebec government passed Bill 78 to stop these protests. The problem is that this bill has attracted the ire of from a number of sources, including Amnesty International and most recently the United Nations, who say it infringes on such rights as freedom of association. Now it has drawn the ire or another group: Anonymous. They’ve done something that is guaranteed to get some degree of attention worldwide:

Anonymous carried through on a threat issued earlier this week that warned F1 fans to avoid buying their tickets to Montreal’s race online.

The group hacked into a website selling tickets to the June 10 race, dumping names, phone numbers, email addresses, the type of ticket and the amount spent online.

Anonymous had said it would go after the F1 race as part of its campaign against Bill 78, the emergency legislation Quebec passed on May 18 to deal with the protests.

Here’s what worse.According to the CBC, they also sent rather threatening e-nails to ticket holders:

“Do not fool yourself into thinking that you can avoid or contain us, or that the police will protect you from our makeshift weapons. There is nowhere to hide. We know every street, every alley, every park. We know where you will sleep, where you will shop and where you will drink. We have been planning to crash your party for some time now,” the email reads.

The F1 race is the biggest tourist event for Montreal. Any bad press will be one of the top stories in many places worldwide. Seeing the race is a week away as I type this, this could become a huge problem for the Quebec government. It will be what if anything the notorious hacker group does and how the Quebec government responds.

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Anonymous Dumps Some Data And Takes Some Hits

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 6, 2012 by itnerd

There’s a lot of news regarding the notorious hacker group known as Anonymous. First they did the data dump that the promised on Canadian Justice Minister Vic Towes. Here are two videos posted to YouTube on March 1st:

But this only is the start of the fun. Today, Andrew Scheer the Speaker of The House Of Commons ruled that Anonymous had posted videos that made disturbing threats:

“Those who enter political life fully expect to be held accountable for their actions – to their constituents, and to those who are concerned with the issues and initiatives they may advocate,” he said. “However, when duly-elected members are personally threatened for their work in parliament – whether introducing a bill, making a statement, or casting a vote, this House must take the matter very seriously.”

I’m guessing that the notorious hacker group isn’t going to lose sleep over that. But they might lose some sleep over a number of arrests of LulSec members who from what I’m led to believe are loosely tied to Anonymous. FoxNews.com reports that the arrests were part of a multinational sting across the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States on Tuesday morning, and LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, who operated online under the alias “Sabu,” provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with information leading to the arrests. That can’t be good if you’re a fan of Anonymous.

Is this going to spark some sort of reaction? Good question. We’ll see what the deal is in the coming days.

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Megaupload Shutdown…. Anonymous Hits Back

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 20, 2012 by itnerd

The file sharing site Megaupload was raided by the FBI yesterday and was effectively shut down due to the fact that they facilitated illegal file sharing. Now this angered a lot of Internet users, but the hacker group Anonymous went one step further. They launched an attack on the websites of the Department of Justice, the FBI and Universal Music Group, among others using a distributed denial of service attack.

A video was then posted to YouTube which you can watch below:

You’ll also note that the group mentions SOPA and Protect IP. Clearly they aren’t happy. I’m guessing that we’re going to hear more from them.

 

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Apple Hacked By Anonymous (And LulzSec)

Posted in Commentary with tags , , , on July 5, 2011 by itnerd

As if Apple doesn’t have enough issues, comes the news that they have been hacked by Anonymous which includes members from the supposedly defunct group known as LulzSec:

Anonymous and LulzSec, two amorphous groups of computer hackers, released on Monday a short list of usernames and passwords allegedly stolen from one of Apple Inc. servers. The groups appear to have obtained the data from another hacker, who did not intend to release the information publicly. Although Apple has neither commented on nor confirmed the breach, the data appears to be of little strategic value as it doesn’t directly relate to customer information such as credit card numbers.

But the damage is in not what they got, but the fact that they got in at all. If the server in question was running OS X Server, then that is a big issue as security is one of the things that they claim to have in their favor… Though I’ve debunked that previously. Now Apple doesn’t seem to have been the only victim here. Fox News had their Twitter account hacked. I personally won’t be losing sleep over that as it’s Fox News we’re talking about here, not a real news agency. But I digress.

The more these hacks take place, the more likely that law enforcement is going to seriously go after these guys. Or at least, one would hope that were the case.

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Palin Hack Was Really An Illustration Of How Not To Keep Your E-Mail Secure

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on September 18, 2008 by itnerd

Okay. Here’s the deal. Sarah Palin’s e-mail wasn’t hacked by some uber brillant hacker. It was hacked by some dude who managed to figure out how to get in to her e-mail after a few seconds of using Google. So he’s hardly a criminal mastermind by any stretch of the imagination.

According to Wired’s Threat Level blog, the perp who goes by the handle “Rubico” talked about what he did on 4chan:

“As detailed in the postings, the Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.”

This is called social engineering. Basically, “Rubico” counted on the fact that Palin would use easy to remember information to set up and secure her e-mail, and leveraged that to get into it. I guess that should make one should wonder if a VP candidate and MILF can’t secure her e-mail, how can she secure the country?

But I digress.

“Rubico” days as a free person may be numbered. He apparently didn’t cover his tracks well:

“Once the hacker had read the e-mails in Palin’s account, he said he suddenly realized what he’d done and how vulnerable he was to being caught, since he’d used only a single proxy service to hide his IP address.”

Too bad he was that sloppy. Because the FBI has been in touch with the proxy service he used:

“Gabriel Ramuglia who operates Ctunnel, the internet anonymizing service the hacker used to post the information from Palin’s account to the 4chan forum, told Threat Level this morning that the FBI had contacted him yesterday to obtain his traffic logs. Ramuglia said he had about 80 gigabytes of logs to process and hadn’t yet looked for the information the FBI was seeking but planned to be in touch with the agents today.

Ramuglia said the screenshots of Palin’s e-mail account, which the hacker posted online, will help him narrow his search, since they revealed most of the Ctunnel URL that was at the top of the hacker’s browser when he took the screen shot.”

Translation: “Rubico” has just had his 15 minutes of fame which will shortly turn into 15 years in the pen as his cell mates bitch.

In the meantime, here’s what you can learn from this: Use obscure information that can’t be tied directly to you if you ever need to answer a password reset question. Ditto for the password itself. Otherwise, you’ll be dumb and owned. Just like Sarah Palin.

Don’t be a Sarah. Be smart. Be secure.

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Sarah Palin’s E-mail Hacked By “Anonymous” [UPDATED]

Posted in Commentary with tags , , on September 17, 2008 by itnerd

Republican VP Candidate and MILF Sarah Palin has had her private Yahoo e-mail hacked by the activist group “Anonymous” who are best known for their run-ins with Scientology. The contents of the e-mail account were then posted to the Internet via Wikileaks for all to see (if you can, the site is currently Slashdotted). The damage to Palin is huge. Apparently the contents of the e-mail account prove that she used private e-mail to to shield government business from public scrutiny, which from what I hear is illegal.

Sucks to be her.

Here’s the deal. Attacking Scientology is one thing. While I don’t condone that, I’m not losing sleep over it either and neither it seems are the authorities. However, when somebody hacks a VP candidate, the FBI and Secret Service can be fully expected to bring the pain to these individuals…. whomever they might be. If they can pin this on someone, they’re about to get owned.

Having said that, it should be interesting to see how McCain and Palin respond to this very embarrasing leak.

UPDATE: Gawker has posted more info on this including some contents of her e-mail account as well as a selection of her address list. As for McCain and Palin’s response to this, campaign manager Rick Davis said this:

“This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.”

Dude, the genie is out of the bottle. Everybody is going to be poking through these e-mails. You’ve got a major issue on your hands.

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