"Anonymous," the outlaw group powering Operation Payback, identifies itself with the principles espoused by WikiLeaks. Anonymous "hacktivists" attacked MasterCard and Visa Wednesday, shortly after those businesses quit processing donations made to WikiLeaks through their sites. Operation Payback works by amassing hacktivists into a voluntary botnet that renders sites useless by inundating them with information.
Operation payback: Distributed denial of service hacktivism
Operation Payback is a form of hacktivism depending on distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Becoming "hacktivists" is the suggestion the hacker group Anonymous suggests anyone with a computer and web should do. A free download of the attack tool LOIC is even being offered. Installing the LOIC assault tool links a computer to a voluntary botnet that saturates targeted websites with a flood of data. As of Thursday morning LOIC was downloaded 31,000 times. There was a shut down Wednesday for websites like MasterCard and Visa. The LOIC botnet was responsible for the DDoS attacks. “MasterCard is an evil puppet of the U.S. government," is what Anonymous hacktivists changed the MasterCard Wikipedia entry to say.
Assisting WikiLeaks with Anonymous
Other Distributed denial of service attacks were put on the Church of Scientology, Gene Simmons of KISS and any law firms suing pirates of music and video from Anonymous. In addition to releasing the LOIC attack tool, Anonymous has helped create more than 1,000 mirror websites where exact copies of WikiLeaks content could be found. "Dark Nets" are the very encrypted layers of web where information can't be traced however still accessed which is where the WikiLeaks content is put by the hacktivist team. The next target for Anonymous is rumored to be Amazon.com, which pulled WikiLeaks off its U.S. machines last week at the request of the federal government.
An anonymous, solid enemy
Operation Payback is an easy assault to launch. It does not cost much either. Defending in opposition to DDoS attacks is costly though. It is not easy either. A business that is large can pay $10,000 a month for an excellent cyber security system. This is supposed to stop them from happening. Cyber security states the attacks from Operation payback are really pretty small. Less than 10 gigabits per second of information is being transferred. The computers that the attack comes from are rotated by Anonymous continuously so it is harder to defend against it. Several of Operation Payback online websites were really shut down themselves Wed due to a counterattack.
Citations
NPR
marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/08/pm-hacktivism-can-be-pricey-for-businesses/
ABC News
abcnews.go.com/US/operation-payback-anonymous-cyber-battle-erupts-wikileaks/story?id=12351428
BBC News
bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11957367
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