Items tagged with Anonymous
Donald Trump has caused quite a stir during the 2016 presidential race; his second bid for The White House. No matter what your viewpoints are about Trump, there’s no doubt that he is a controversial figure that draws strong opinions from either the “for” or “against” crowd. One group that is decidedly in the “against” camp is Anonymous. Anonymous is apparently fed up with Trump and his meteoric rise during the Republican primaries, and has declared “Total War” on the presidential candidate. "Dear Donald Trump, we have been watching you for a long time and what we see is deeply disturbing," reads a masked figure with a computerized voice. “Your inconsistent and hateful campaign has not only shocked...
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The hacking group known as Anonymous wants your help in fighting back against ISIS, though not by taking up guns or through illegal cyber activities against the terrorist organization. Instead, Anonymous is calling on all web users to post mocking photos of ISIS and generally just poking fun at the terrorist group today, a day that Anonymous has declared "Troll ISIS Day." Anonymous posted several tips on how to troll ISIS in an online post to Ghostbin. The hacking group is asking for anyone and everyone to post their shenanigans on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and in the real world, if applicable. The hacking group makes clear that its campaign is open to everyone who's willing to participate,...
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Facebook seems to have been focusing giving its users the ability to be anonymous in recent weeks. In October it was rumored that the company was working on a new mobile app, which has been designated Rooms, that would allow users to interact with each other under an alias. But now, Facebook is making its social media website more Tor-friendly. The company announced that Tor users could get a secure connection to its servers by visiting https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/ that will provide end-to-end encryption. Prior to this, it was a chore for Tor users to connect through a Tor-enabled internet browser since Facebook’s security would tend to treat Tor as a botnet. “We decided to...
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This weekend, Dropbox experienced an outage that lasted far too long. A wing of hacker collective Anonymous claimed credit for the outage, saying it performed a database hack, which turned out to be a hoax. However, the group maintained that it did hit Dropbox with a DDoS attack, which was timed to coincide with the site’s scheduled maintenance. Dropbox has strongly denied the hack, but it hasn’t said anything about the claim of a DDoS attack, which seems odd. The company has talked around it by carefully describing the post-mortem. “On Friday at 5:30 PM PT, we had a planned maintenance scheduled to upgrade the OS on some of our machines. During this process, the upgrade script...
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For a moment there, it appeared as though popular cloud storage service Dropbox had been hacked, with the user database accessed and user emails being exposed. Two loosely affiliated wings of hacker collective Anonymous, AnonOpsKorea and The 1775 Sec, claimed credit, but the whole thing was just a hoax timed to coincide with scheduled Dropbox site maintenance. Credit: TechCrunch The two groups both claimed that they compromised the Dropbox website Friday evening and accessed the site’s database, but shortly thereafter Wesley McGrew of McGrew Security noted in a tweet that the emails in the supposed database leak matched something that’s been posted on Pastebin for over a month. In...
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Nowadays, there seems to be a website for everything. But would you believe that there isn't one for the hacktivist group Anonymous? In reality, it's of little surprise, as this is a group that lacks a typical hierarchy - it has no leader, and equal rights among all members. Via social networks, it spreads its developments and findings, and up to this point, it's proven to be quite a successful means in doing so. However, things are about to change a little bit. Recently, the group behind the @YourAnonNews Twitter account set up an Indiegogo campaign to help raise the funds to launch a website, which would act as a news portal. The minimum target was about as modest as they come - a...
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At this point in time, it's pretty-well assured that the vast majority of people are getting a little annoyed by North Korea's ongoing antics, and while we'd love to see things settle down and people be reasonable, that's not the restrictive state's way. It seems that the country has only one outcome in mind, and for that reason, hacktivist group Anonymous has stepped-in in an attempt to annoy it right back. In the best way it knows how, Anonymous has begun targeting social networking accounts and websites related to the country, such as news site Uriminzokkiri and its related Flickr page. It also claims to have 15,000 usernames and passwords snatched from a North Korean university...
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Following rumors that hacktivist collective Anonymous had breached the US Federal Reserve servers this past weekend comes word from the Fed itself to acknowledge that it did in fact happen. Despite the fact that Anonymous managed to leak information on some 4,000 banking executives, the Federal Reserve is down-playing the the incident due to fact that no truly sensitive information was among this (home addresses, for example) and nothing but that server itself was compromised. This acts as another wake-up call for those who are meant to keep these servers secure, however, because while the information snatched might be considered no big deal, it shouldn't have been accessed at all by outside...
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The Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio sparked a controversy earlier this year when it rolled out its "Student Locator Project," an initiative that requires students to wear ID badges with embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. NISD's website is down today, and a member of the hacking organization known as Anonymous reached out HotHardware to take credit for the outage. NISD said it wanted to expand the Student Locator Project to 112 Texas schools and around 100,000 students to curb truancy, apparently a major problem at the school district in question. It was reported that by improving attendance, NISD could receive as much as $20 million in additional...
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In celebration of Guy Fawkes Day, members of Anonymous and many other hacker groups have taken to the Web to deface as many websites as possible, focusing on both big and small. At the time of writing, it's a little difficult to see exactly how each targeted website was defaced, but the numbers keep on rising. According to ZDNET, ImageShack, PayPal, NBC, Lady GaGa's official, Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno portals (related to NBC), Arcelor Mittal (mining company in Australia), GiftNow, the official Greek City site and the Ghana Consulate site have all been hacked and defaced in some way. Further, someone has leaked source for the kernel of VMware's ESX Server software. In itself,...
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As we reported on Tuesday, GoDaddy suffered a major outage that left thousands, and potentially millions of customers with downed websites and services. While a supposed member of the Anonymous collective took credit for an attack, GoDaddy has since concluded that no hack or distributed denial of service attack took place. Instead, the company has posted on its site that the cause of the issue was a router that somehow had its data tables corrupted. Many have remained skeptical about this claim, however, as for a single router being able to take out all of GoDaddy seems unlikely. All hosts have, or should have, excellent redundancy in place. GoDaddy's outage didn't last mere minutes, but hours....
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On Monday around mid-morning, a lone hacker claiming association to hacker collective Anonymous attacked GoDaddy.com, taking down many of the personal and small business websites that GoDaddy hosts. GoDaddy posted some vague Tweets throughout the day, assuring its customers that it was aware of and working on the problem, and the following was posted on the official company website: At 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT. At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide...
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Earlier this month, Symantec essentially shrugged after hacker group Lords of Dharmaraja swiped source code to some Symantec products from Indian military servers and threatened to release it. Now, it appears to have been a lot of false bravado on Symantec’s part. Symantec has publicly acknowledged the breach(es), the extent of the damage, and what customers should do about it. In a special post on its website, Symantec said; Our investigation continues to indicate that the theft is limited to only the code for the 2006 versions of Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere. However, after analysis,...
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In terms of security, it’s been an obscenely bad year for Sony. The company suffered a series of embarrassing and very public hacks and attacks on its various sites and systems at the hands of PS3 hacker George Hotz and then, far more maliciously, Anonymous and LulzSec. The whole bloodbath is both a testament to the disturbing power of hackers and a case study on some of the worst ways to deal with security breaches and associated litigation. Sony has taken at least one measure to shore up its badly compromised borders by hiring Philip R. Reitinger as its Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Corporate Executive in charge of global information security and privacy,...
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Anonymous and its various splinter groups have kept themselves in the headlines for quite some time by hacking and/or attacking a diverse cadre of people, groups, and Web sites, such as Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), PayPal, government contractors, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony, and so on. The latest victim is Richard T. Garcia, a senior vice president for defense contractor Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI) and board member of InfraGard, a “sinister alliance of law enforcement, military, and private security contractors dedicated to protecting the infrastructure of the very systems we aim to destroy,” or so says Anonymous group AntiSec in the message...
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Hacker group Anonymous promised a cyberattack on the website of San Francisco Bay Area transit agency BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), starting at 12 noon PST on Sunday, Aug. 14, and they delivered, managing deface two related sites, as well leak user data from one of the sites. Both site defacements are related to Operation Bart (#OpBART on Twitter), the organization said, on the OpBART Facebook page. MyBART.org saw a cache of user data leaked, while the other site, californiaavoid.org, which is maintained by the California Office of Traffic Safety, said defacement on that site consisted as a rotating set of images. Almost all were related to Anonymous and featured the Guy Fawkes mask...
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On the same day a high-level LulzSec "operative" was arrested, Anonymous and LulzSec announced #OpPayPal, a method to get back at online payment service PayPal without hacking, and legally. #OpPayPal might be called an offshoot of the previous #AntiSec movement by Anonymous and LulzSec. Posting on their site of choice, pastebin, the two hacker groups asked its members and supporters to begin, not just a boycott of PayPal, but to begin cancelling accounts. Here's what the message said, in part: PayPal continues to withhold funds from WikiLeaks, a beacon of truth in these dark times. By simply standing up for ourselves and uniting the people, PayPal still sees it fit to wash its hands of any blame,...
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Earlier this week, hacker collective Anonymous decided that it would found its own social networking site after being shut down on Google+. The site, which is (temporarily) named Anon+, will give users freedoms that sites like Facebook and Google+ will not, according to developer/hacker "Higochoa." Higochoa is part of a team of 12 to 15 other developers, plus freelancers, who are building the site. Like the other social networks, Anon+ will allow members to create profiles, add friends and communicate, as well as give users total control over who they share information with. The big difference is that the entire site will be anonymous, which is not allowed on the other networks. The site will...
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The PlayStation Network outage and customer data thefts from earlier this year cost Sony an enormous amount of lost revenue and have spawned a veritable fleet of lawsuits. At least one of the company's insurance providers has panicked and is asking for a court ruling that would confirm it has no responsibility to cover any of Sony's expenses. The company, Zurich American Insurance Company (ZAIC), filed the request on Wednesday. ZAIC claims: [T]he claims set forth in the Class Action Complaints filed against SCEA and the other Sony Defendants, as well as the miscellaneous claims, arising out of the cyber attacks on the PSN and SOE Network and the unauthorized access to and theft of the named plaintiffs...
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After having its Google+ profile removed for community standards violations, hacker collective Anonymous has decided to try the social networking thing for itself. The site, currently running under the temporary name of AnonPlus, is only a splash page at this point, with a message explaining the intent and goals of the site. Primarily, Anonymous wants a site where there will be no fear of "censorship," "blackout," or "holding back." They also mention that the site will be open to anyone that wants to join and not just to members of Anonymous. "This project is not overnight and will take many of those out there who simply want a better internet," notes the message. "We will not be stopped by those...
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Anonymous' latest AntiSec hack centers on Booz Allen Hamilton (AKA Booz Allen). Booz Allen's core business is "contractual work completed on behalf of the US federal government, foremost on defense and homeland security matters." Guess what Anonymous leaked? The login information of 90,000 members of the military. Typically, the hacker group posted the information on pastebin. Anonymous' interest in Booz Allen, the hacker groups said, was over "questionable involvement in the U.S. government's SWIFT surveillance program." Additionally, the group said, Booz Allen was complicit, along with HBGary Federal, in a project intended "to destroy the concept of online anonymity." Anonymous added that they...
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LulzSec's last set of "booty" contained malware, and although the now disbanded hacker group placed a warning about the Trojan Horse in their "press release," you had to read the fine print to be warned about it. Way at the bottom their announcement the group posted the following information: Note: In "AT&T internal data.rar", do not open "BootableUSB/Program Files/WinRar/WinRar v3.71.exe", as it is malware (due to AT&T using a pirated copy of WinRar). First, why didn't they just remove that before posting it? Second, why would AT&T be using a pirated copy? It's also interesting that they would have embedded WinRAR itself in the RAR file. To open it, you'd either need WinRAR or some...
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