The UK News of the World phone hacking scandal stole the headlines from the more traditional IT problems.
An 18-year-old man was arrested in the Shetland Islands in July as part of an investigation into hacking groups, Anonymous and LulzSec. The man is suspected of using the online nickname Topiary and presenting himself as a spokesman for the groups. The arrest of Topiary is the third made in the UK in the search for members of the group, following that of Ryan Cleary, in Essex, in June, and the arrest and release in London last week of a 16-year-old known online as Tflow. The apparent ringleader of the group, known online as Sabu, remains at large.
LulzSec claims to have carried out attacks on a number of sites, including the Sun last week when it redirected readers to a fake story claiming Rupert Murdoch was dead, and others during May and June including attacks on the , an FBI-affiliated site, the US Congress, and Sony’s European network. LulzSec has previously claimed responsibility for attempted hacks made on the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), the US Senate, the CIA and the Sun newspaper
Sixteen people were arrested in the United States last month in connection with hacking attacks by the Anonymous group of online activists, as well as one person in the U.K. and four people in the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Now Hacker Collective Anonymous is developing, a more sophisticated tool called ReRefor use in its denial of service attacks to take down websites, according to a post on the AnonOps Communications blog.
This new tool, , is an alternative to the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS utility promoted by Anonymous as an attack tool which attempts to flood a site with TCP or UDP packers, essentially overwhelming the site with junk traffic The RefRef tool will use the hosting server’s own processing power through a resource exhaustion method that uses a known, but not widely patched, SQL vulnerability to install a .js file on the server, which then overwhelms the server with requests.
The tool, which is due for release in September, is not expected to be effective for repeated use against targets because the SQL vulnerability can be patched, but the creators also don’t expect many organizations to make the effort to patch it if they haven’t been attacked already. Be warned!
The LOIC, originally developed as a network stress testing application, has been effective in enabling DDOS attacks that overwhelm sites with junk packets and can be launched from a web browser. However, the tool does not attempt to conceal the attacker’s IP address, so if the user is sending packets from their home computer without using a proxy or similar tool to anonymise the packets, each one will contain the users own IP address. This has led to several Anonymous members being traced by law enforcement and arrested in recent months.
Meanwhile, according to the BBCSanford Wallace, a US man accused of breaching Facebook spam filters and sending out over 27 million spam messages to Facebook users has turned himself in to the FBI. Prosecutors allege that Wallace, known as the Spam King, developed a programme that lured users to submit their account details to a website controlled by him. Wallace has denied the charges and has been released on $100,000 bail. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in jail. According to prosecutors, the programme developed by Wallace posted messages, supposedly from friends, on Facebook users’ walls, telling them to visit a website where their account details were then stolen.
Hacker group Anonymous broke into the Syrian Ministry of Defence’s website, mod.gov.sy on Sunday night and left a screen with a mock up of the Syrian flag with the Anonymous logo of a faceless man in the middle, in place of normal website content. A message to the Syrian people from Anonymous was revealed in English. There was a coutner attack and it seems that pro-government hackers in Syria retaliated against hacktivist collective Anonymous by temporarily taking over the latter’s social networking site. When accessing Anonymous’s site, AnonPlus, earlier today, visitors were greeted with the words “Terrorist Kills, Syrian Army and Syrian Civilians” in large type against a flag of the Arab nation, which has been subject to mass anti-government protests in recent months. Since the unrest began, up to 2,000 civilians and 500 members of President Bashar Al-Assad’s security forces have reportedly been killed.
They posted the following message in both Arabic and English on AnonPlus this morning: “In response to your hacking to the website of the Syrian Ministry of Defence, the Syrian people have decided to purify the internet of your pathetic website. Your website has been hacked, and here we leave you these photos showing the scale of terrorism committed by Muslim Brotherhood Organization, whose members have been killing Syrian citizens – civilian and military. You are defending this terrorits [sic] organization and this is our response. here is photos of the Syrian Army Martyrs”
