Not that many years ago...
...such an 'incident' could have set off WW3.
Times have changed, if not power-hungry politicians.
Hacktivist group Anonymous has been up to its old tricks again, this time briefly taking out the web site of the Russian president as a show of support for the growing opposition to newly re-crowned leader Vladimr Putin. Like most of the group's DDoS campaigns, the attack only temporarily disrupted the kremlin.ru site, which …
Yes, exactly like the Russians who are quick to prosecute internet fraud and scare ware fraud when the perps are Russians and the victims are everyone else. Don't know which countries would help the Ruskies on this or why in the heck anyone would. Very dubious claim you are making.
Some anonymous people don't like entity X and ddos it. Next week some anonymous people won't like entity Y and ddos it. Repeat ad nauseum for years with randomly chosen targets. How many anonymous people are there, do they overlap, are they representative, are they doing it for the lulz or strong convictions? No one knows, no one really cares. Defacing a website and denial of service is akin to defacing a poster. The long term effect of these acts is zero.
This sort of vandalism needs to be seen in the context of that. The headline may as well say "website vulnerable to ddos is attacked by vandals" over and over because that's all these stories amount regardless of the website in question.
I'd wager there are several more in the IT community who are now aware of Bahrain's terrible human rights abuses following Anonymous' targetting of the F1 championships being held there. Similarly, although I'm fairly familiar with what is going on in Russian politics at the moment, there are probably a fair few that are now becoming aware of the growing discontent in Russia right now because of this. Anonymous' attacks do raise awareness sometimes. And it's interesting because if the US or European authorities *could* shut down Anonymous, they almost certainly would. Which suggests they aren't having much luck. So the continued activities of Anonymous are a commentary on enforcement ability as well which I find interesting.
Anonymous will fragment, Anonymous will go through cycles. Some will get caught and prosecuted, some will drop out, but others will think: "this is good, I want to do this" and become Anonymous and carry on. I think Anonymous is going to be with us for some time.
several ? yeah a few maybe
Has anyone outside of the IT community heard of anonymous?
ok they hit the headlines once or twice but now that they are old news, the public has forgotten .
Whithin the IT only reg readers, and I have friends in IT who havent heard of the Reg !
(they are berated for it)
There was copious news reportage of Bahrain and Russian politics prior to this attack which amounts to little more than a blip really. If people are not aware of the political situations before and only became aware through an attack then clearly they have no interest in the news or the politics in the first place. So what exactly is the attack bringing to the table? Nothing except for another headline for anonymous before they move onto something else next week.
Wrote :- "several more in the IT community who are now aware of Bahrain's terrible human rights abuses following Anonymous' targetting of the F1 championships being held there"
More to do with Bahrain drawing attention to themselves by hosting an event like that
And :- "there are probably a fair few that are now becoming aware of the growing discontent in Russia right now"
OK, I'm aware of it. Big suprise. Actually, there are billions of people around the world discontent with their governments. Me for a start, and I live in the UK, a democratic, liberal, fair, balanced country where there is no corruption, politicians never lie or take bribes or are influenced by charming and wealthy "personalities"; and what matters is merit, not money, and every decision is made as the result of intelligent informed debate, not soundbites. Oh, wait a minute ......
What do you know about Russia anyway - live there? I'd rather exert my energies on issues in my own country - there are plenty at close hand. It's not as easy though as sitting, with no risk of face-to-face encounter, pointing to real or supposed issues from a great distance, issues which are not always as they appear or what the media make them appear, sorry.
You are thinking about this the wrong way. Anonymous does DDOS BECAUSE it gains media attention. If it did not, they would simply do something else which does. In which case you would still be confused and saying "why does THIS act gain media attention."
Stick your web server behind some hardware such as Cisco Guard which does traffic analysis and starts dropping malicious connections while preserving the legitimate ones. I assume there would be a lot of heuristics involved but the idea would be to identify malicious requests and discard them.
No news on Anonymous hacking Ricardo B Salinas' site, or them DDoSing Mexican Bank "Banco Azteca" over the Presidential Candidate Debate last week. TV Azteca chose to air a dull footie match at the same time, with the CEO arguing that people would want to watch footie more than the debate.
End Result: The debate's rating nearly doubled the footie match's rating, and the match ended in a 4-1 defeat for Morelia's team ... which is owned by TV Azteca's holding company. Oh, and Anonymous going on a DDoS spree against all Grupo Salinas companies' sites, hacking a couple of 'em and basically making R.B. Salinas look like an ass.