"The Largest Attack Ever by Anonymous - 5,635 People Confirmed Using #LOIC to Bring Down Sites! #Anonymous"
https://twitter.com/#!/YourAnonNews/status/16013585889533542...
On a separate note, I would have thought they had learned their lesson re: LOIC after OP:Payback. I guess we'll be seeing another string of arrests in the coming months.
Basically, LOIC is a ticket to jail. The fact that it was used for so long without repercussions is that the Feds didn't care enough to do anything. That all changed with OP:Payback.
Street protests make whole streets inaccessible, and may disable access to stores, businesses or what not.
I'd also consider it a form of peaceful protest. Well, actually it's just data, nobody gets physically harmed so it's always peaceful. Anyways, you are not stealing data and you are not permanently harming the system. You basically do something the site is made for (serving requests). If you consider that a crime you could also consider telling a huge people to phone a company and complain about something a crime. I mean this certainly leads to a denial of service, because it makes it virtually impossible for others to use that service.
I for myself am a bit lazy for these kinds of protests. I actually prefer informing people so they draw their own conclusion, but I would never call something like that a crime. IMO it should be treated like a freedom. I know this can cause financial damage, but it's still not harming people. I mean every news article, every kind of information and just saying something like "Nike is child slavery" or "fast food from McDonalds is unhealthy" can make people not buy stuff there and therefore cause financial damage. In first place it's about an institution and we shouldn't consider an institution something that has human rights, because it devalues natural people.
On HN's frontpage, hours before the take down, then this.
But I take your point , it contributes to a general "the internet is scary" atmosphere.
"Anonymous" is so handy, if they didn't exist the government would just have to invent them.
I can't think of a specific time in a normal HTTP request that would use a user-supplied hash.
I would assume only a minority of pages on the average site would eat CPU so surely the sensible defense to this would be to impose a maximum CPU usage on these parts so the rest of the website continues to work.
page.php?x=1&y=1...
where the x and y keys are going to have the same hash value, so that when it uses those vars in a page it will hit the same hash bucket and become O(n) not O(1)?
Of course you would want to send a lot of different vars in.
Reeling in unwitting volunteers from Twitter
setInterval(function(){
var i = new Image();
i.src = target + randId + msg;
... // event handling
}, 0)
If they are tricking people into performing what is potentially a criminal act then they lose the limited amount of respect I did have for them.
Once you start doing thousands of concurrent connections you more likely to kill your router anyway.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/apache-killer
But that is pure speculation. What I'm trying to say is there are far more tools than LOIC to pull of a DDOS attack.
In fact, the only compliance regulations I know of with government sites have to do with accessibility.
[EDIT] Wait, I might be wrong. The DoD guide seems to cite quite a few regs, some of which may apply to the Justice department. Too bad I can't check their site :P
http://www.defense.gov/webmasters/policy/dod_web_policy_1207...
I don't think that's true. I'd imagine the server behind justice.gov has no connectivity to anything important for compliance reasons, so patching it isn't really a big deal.
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/932/
Anonymous is an interesting cultural phenomenon, but hiding behind a common shared identity is not new. For example, see here:
Edit: Add mpaa.org to the mix, as well as an attempt on fbi.gov. They'd have to have several gigs worth of bandwidth available to be able to hold all 4 sites down simultaneously. With average upload speeds in the hundreds of kilobits, that's a reasonably large botnet (50k-100k, as an pulled-from-ass guestimate).