Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

If headlines are their objective, then I'd say it is

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

From where I'm standing Anonymous just entered the world stage in a way that it has never done before.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

And how long do you think that interest will last?

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

I dunno, but if you went into everything with that attitude, most issues probably wouldn't seem worth the effort. Scientology's not exactly front page news but the people here still persist in spreading the info. A three-line mention of Scientology on page 27 of a local paper, and the place is a bukakke fest, so don't try to pretend you don't crave that same attention for Chanology.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Digital activists now have the tools to change the world. Expect disruption – Telegraph Blogs

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Paypal on the front page? Really?

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

LOL irony. Then again, the separation of wwp and chanology from Anonymous

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

p2pnet news » Blog Archive » Who Anonymous is. By Anonymous

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Yeppers! Sit-ins were non violent but were often a disruption of service for a while similar to these DDoS attacks.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Will you PM me when you succeed in separating wwp/chanology from Anonymous. I'll be curious as to how you did it.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

WWP is Anonymous.
Anonymous is not WWP.

Ta-da!

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

Just thought of checking mastercard.com, etc. and it's still up. lulz

Guess there's a lunch break, or moar to come.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

LOL (sweet!)

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

As usual, you're about 2 days late.

Re: Anonymous fighting PayPal, a Swiss Bank, Mastercard and others

I guess my biking habits have affected me being on here more often, it's been a few months since I logged on.

Anonymous cyber-attacks cost PayPal £3.5m, court told

Student on trial accused of playing a leading role in revenge campaign against several sites after backlash against WikiLeaks

By Sandra Laville, crime correspondent, The Guardian

Four activists from the hackers collective Anonymous caused multimillion-pound losses to a number of firms in revenge for the backlash against WikiLeaks, a court has heard.

Using the name Operation Payback, the four flooded websites belonging to companies including PayPal and Ministry of Sound with messages and requests in order to bring them down.

People who tried to visit the sites were greeted with the message: "You've tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung."

What began as a targeting of the music industry over its antipiracy stance turned into a campaign in support of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The self-styled "hactivists" caused losses worth more than £3.5m at PayPal and caused sites belonging to MasterCard and the recording industry to go offline.

Three of the group have admitted their role in the conspiracy. Christopher Weatherhead, 22, a student at Northampton University, is on trial at Southwark crown court accused of being "part of a small cabal of leaders" of the cyber-attacks.

Opening the prosecution case, Sandip Patel said Weatherhead – who went by the online name "Nerdo" – played a central role in the campaign mounted in 2010. "This case, simply put, is about hackers who used the internet to attack and disable computer systems, colloquially described as cyber-attackers or vandals," Patel said.

"Christopher Weatherhead, the defendant, is a cyber-attacker, and … he and others like him waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks that paralysed a series of targeted computer systems belonging to companies, to which they took issue with for whatever reason, that caused unprecedented harm."

The campaign involved Weatherhead and his three co-conspirators carrying out distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks against the companies, the court heard. The tactic paralyses a computer system by flooding it with an "intolerable number of online requests and messages", Patel said.

"The members of Anonymous describe themselves as hacktivists … They conducted online attacks against computer systems which they took the view, for whatever reason, needed to be dealt with, taught a lesson. Their method was to carry out DDoS attacks in order to bring them down."

He said Operation Payback had originally targeted companies involved in the music industry and opponents of internet piracy, but was later broadened to include new objectives after the backlash against the publication of classified data by WikiLeaks.

The four used a free internet tool called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) as a "destructive cyber weapon", the court heard. "Once downloaded, the LOIC could be used to attack by sending internet traffic to a target computer," Patel said. "When the volume of traffic sent to a computer becomes too much for it to handle it would suffer a denial of service. The more LOICs used, therefore, to attack a target computer, the more likely that a denial of service will take place."

He said the LOIC was used in connection with an online chat system called AnonOps to allow Weatherhead and other hackers to order several computers or "bots" to attack simultaneously.

Weatherhead is alleged to have played a "prominent" role in setting up the online chat – or internet relay chat (IRC) system to attack PayPal and other sites and was, the court heard, the network administrator of AnonOps. "He was responsible for organising the IRCs used and directing resources for campaigns," Patel said.

Weatherhead bought the website anonops.net from a Russian-based service provider that he claimed to know "permitted anything, even CP – child pornography", the court heard. "A number of organisations, were targeted some of which have contacted the police and confirmed the level of damage caused by such attacks. There were many more, we know that from chat logs, but they may not have known what had happened to them."

He said the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) was attacked on 19-20 September 2010, though the DDoS did not shut the site down. Four websites operated by Ministry of Sound were also attacked between 3 and 6 October. "As a consequence of the attack they suffered loss of reputation and sales," Patel said. "The total cost of the attack, including additional staffing, software and loss of sales, was approximately £9,000."

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry was forced to spend £20,000 as a result of being attacked between 27 November and 6 December.

Weatherhead, of Northampton, denies one count of conspiracy to impair the operation of computers between 1 August 2010 and 27 January last year. Ashley Rhodes, 28, of south London, Peter Gibson, 24, of Hartlepool, and an 18-year-old from Chester have pleaded guilty to the same charge. The trial continues.

From www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/22/anonymous-cyber-attacks-paypal-court

Dude.

This thread is TWO YEARS OLD.

They seemed to have forgotten that we are leaderless. Dumb media is dumb, without doing research.

I don't think the poster cared. :O

It's an update on the ongoing court proceedings,and the perfect thread to post it in .. Once again 612 you are too quick to judge. Why not try reading now and again before putting mouth in gear.

Thanks for the update TWG .. as always you're doing a sterling job.

Prosecution of Anonymous activists highlights war for Internet control - The Guardian

The US and allied governments exploit both law and cyber-attacks as a weapon to punish groups that challenge it

By Glenn Greenwald

Whatever one thinks of WikiLeaks, it is an indisputable fact that the group has never been charged by any government with any crime, let alone convicted of one. Despite that crucial fact, WikiLeaks has been crippled by a staggering array of extra-judicial punishment imposed either directly by the US and allied governments or with their clear acquiescence.

In December 2010, after WikiLeaks began publishing US diplomatic cables, it was hit with cyber-attacks so massive that the group was "forced to change its web address after the company providing its domain name cut off service". After public demands and private pressure from US Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman, Amazon then cut off all hosting services to WikiLeaks. Sophisticated cyber-attacks shortly thereafter forced the group entirely off all US website services when its California-based internet hosting provider, Everydns, terminated service, "saying it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber-attacks targeted at WikiLeaks".

Meanwhile, Chairman Lieberman's public pressure, by design, also led to the destruction of WikiLeaks' ability to collect funds from supporters. Master Card and Visa both announced they would refuse to process payments to the group, as did America's largest financial institution, Bank of America. Paypal not only did the same but froze all funds already in WikiLeaks' accounts (almost two years later, a court in Iceland ruled that a Visa payment processor violated contract law by cutting of those services). On several occasions in both 2011 and 2012, WikiLeaks was prevented from remaining online by cyber-attacks.

Over the past two years, then, this group - convicted of no crime but engaged in pathbreaking journalism that produced more scoops than all other media outlets combined and received numerous journalism awards - has been effectively prevented from functioning, receiving funds, or even maintaining a presence on US internet servers. While it's unproven what direct role the US government played in these actions, it is unquestionably clear that a top US Senator successfully pressured private corporations to cut off its finances, and more important, neither the US nor its allies have taken any steps to discover and apprehend the perpetrators of the cyber-attacks that repeatedly targeted WikiLeaks, nor did it even investigate those attacks.

The ominous implications of all this have been never been fully appreciated. Recall that all the way back in 2008, the Pentagon prepared a secret report (ultimately leaked to WikiLeaks) that decreed WikiLeaks to be a "threat to the US Army" and an enemy of the US. That report plotted tactics that "would damage and potentially destroy" its ability to function. That is exactly what came to pass.

So this was a case where the US government - through affirmative steps and/or approving acquiescence to criminal, sophisticated cyber-attacks - all but destroyed the ability of an adversarial group, convicted of no crime, to function on the internet. Who would possibly consider that power anything other than extremely disturbing? What possible political value can the internet serve, or journalism generally, if the US government, outside the confines of law, is empowered - as it did here - to cripple the operating abilities of any group which meaningfully challenges its policies and exposes its wrongdoing?

But what makes all of this even more significant is the vastly disparate treatment of those who launched far less sophisticated and damaging attacks at those corporations which complied with US demands and cut off all funding and other services to WikiLeaks. Acting in the name of Anonymous, a handful of activists targeted those companies with simple "denial of service" attacks, ones that impeded the operations of those corporate websites for a few hours.

In stark contrast to the far more significant attacks aimed at WikiLeaks, these attacks, designed to protest the treatment of WikiLeaks, spawned a global manhunt by western nations and, ultimately, the arrest of dozens of mostly young alleged hackers, four of whom are now on trial in London:

"Four activists from the hackers collective Anonymous caused multimillion-pound losses to a number of firms in revenge for the backlash against WikiLeaks, a court has heard.

"Using the name Operation Payback, the four flooded websites belonging to companies including PayPal and Ministry of Sound with messages and requests in order to bring them down. . . .The self-styled 'hactivists' caused losses worth more than £3.5m at PayPal and caused sites belonging to MasterCard and the recording industry to go offline.

"Three of the group have admitted their role in the conspiracy. Christopher Weatherhead, 22, a student at Northampton University, is on trial at Southwark crown court accused of being 'part of a small cabal of leaders' of the cyber-attacks. . . .

"The four used a free internet tool called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) as a 'destructive cyber weapon', the court heard. 'Once downloaded, the LOIC could be used to attack by sending internet traffic to a target computer,' [the prosecutor] said. 'When the volume of traffic sent to a computer becomes too much for it to handle it would suffer a denial of service. The more LOICs used, therefore, to attack a target computer, the more likely that a denial of service will take place.'"

Continued below

Continued from above

Last year, the FBI arrested 16 people in the US in connection with similar attacks on Master Card, Visa and Amazon, and charged them with crimes that carry 10-year prison terms.

The issue here is not whether Anonymous activists can be rightfully prosecuted: acts of civil disobedience, by definition, are violations of the law designed to protest or create a cost for injustices. The issue is how selectively these cyber-attack laws are enforced: massive cyber-attacks aimed at a group critical of US policy (WikiLeaks) were either perpetrated by the US government or retroactively sanctioned by it, while relatively trivial, largely symbolic attacks in defense of the group were punished with the harshest possible application of law enforcement resources and threats of criminal punishment.

That the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode: nobody, regardless of one's views on WikiLeaks, should want any government to have that power. But the manifestly overzealous prosecutions of Anonymous activists, in stark contrast to the (at best) indifference to the attacks on WikiLeaks, makes all of that even worse. In line with its unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers generally, this is yet another case of the US government exploiting the force of law to entrench its own power and shield its actions from scrutiny.

Disclosure

Over the past couple months, I've been involved in discussions regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments, one that would provide funding and a network for other means of support to enable them to operate. My role would be limited to unpaid board member. The group is not yet formed and my participation is only in the preliminary discussion stages, but disclosure still seems appropriate given the topic I'm writing about here. If and when this evolves further, as I hope it will, I will certainly write more on it.

From www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/anonymous-trial-wikileaks-internet-freedom

The writer still hasn't corrected the part where anonymous has no leader, saying they have a leader.

But props to the guardian, they're at least trying to help wikileaks by showing some of the truth that the fucking government doesn't want most to know about.

Here are some ways to contact the author:

http://twitter.com/ggreenwald

www.facebook.com/glenn.greenwald.5

www.facebook.com/pages/Glenn-Greenwald/133589063340547

Anonymous Hackers Jailed over PayPal Attack

Dow Jones Newswires

Published January 24, 2013

Two computer hackers were jailed by a London court Thursday for a series of cyber-attacks by the hacking group Anonymous that cost the U.S. online payments giant PayPal millions of dollars.

Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old student, was sentenced to 18 months in jail after being found guilty last month of carrying out attacks on PayPal, MasterCard Inc (MA), Visa Inc (V) and other companies that refused to process payments to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

Ashley Rhodes, 28, admitted the same charge of conspiring to impair the operation of computers between Aug. 1, 2010 and Jan. 22, 2011 and was jailed for seven months.

Another hacker, 24-year-old Peter Gibson, had also pleaded guilty but was deemed to have played a lesser role in the attacks and was given a six-month suspended sentence.

A fourth man, 18-year-old Jake Birchall, who also admitted his involvement, will be sentenced later.

PayPal was repeatedly attacked in December 2010 after the website decided not to process payments made to the Wau Holland Foundation, an organization involved in raising funds for WikiLeaks.

During Weatherhead's trial, prosecutors said the attack had cost the company 3.5 million pounds ($5.5 million) in loss of trading as well as software and hardware updates to fend off similar attacks.

The distributed denial of service attacks as they are dubbed paralyse computer systems by overloading them with online requests.

Targeted websites were directed to a page reading: "You've tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung."

In a campaign codenamed "Operation Payback", Anonymous also targeted companies in the music industry and opponents of music piracy including the Ministry of Sound nightclub and record label, the trial had heard.

www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/01/24/anonymous-hackers-jailed-over-paypal-attack/

Fawx always bitching.

Protest does not pay.

Don't be such a Debbie Downer, of course it does, especially if it brings about positive change and awareness, then the world-at-large benefits.

And don't forget to hand in your time sheets everyone!

I pooped. Some went on the bed.

this makes me sad, have you heard of Depends? Of course you have, anyways, hope you haz washer/dryer thingy things.

*pats Verv on de head*

Teenage hacker sentenced in UK for cyber-attacks - The Associated Press

A British court has sentenced a teenage hacker to youth rehabilitation after he and other members of the Anonymous movement carried out cyber-attacks targeting financial sites like PayPal and Visa.

Jake Birchall had admitted conspiring to impair the operation of computers in 2010 and 2011. The 18-year-old Birchall was sentenced Friday to 18 months of rehabilitation and 60 hours of unpaid work.

Three other co-defendants, aged 22 to 28, were given jail sentences of up to 18 months last week for their part in the attacks. They targeted groups involved in combating Internet piracy and companies that had stopped processing online donations to WikiLeaks.

The websites for Mastercard and Visa were disrupted, and PayPal said the attacks cost it 3.5 million pounds ($5.5 million.)

www.stltoday.com/business/national-and-international/teenage-hacker-sentenced-in-uk-for-cyber-attacks/article_9a162aaf-f9a3-57b9-b381-64d436d7435a.html

Bank of America says hackers lifted its data from a partner | PCWorld

By Jeremy Kirk - March 3, 2013

Bank of America blames a data breach on another company that revealed internal emails related to monitoring of hacktivist groups including Anonymous.

A group affiliated with Anonymous that calls itself the "Anonymous Intelligence Agency: Par:AnoIA" released what it claims is 14GB of data belonging to the bank and other organizations, including Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and TEKsystems.

Email correspondence in the data suggests that TEKsystems was a contractor working for Bank of America and charged with monitoring public activity by hacker networks targeting the bank.

In a statement, Bank of America did not confirm it was working with TEKsystems, an IT consultancy that is part of the Allegis Group. But it said the source of the data came from a third party. Bank of America said its own systems were not compromised.

"In this instance, a third-party company was compromised," according to a Bank of America statement released last week. "This company was working on a pilot program for monitoring publicly available information to identify information security threats."

Officials with TEKsystems and Allegis group could not be immediately reached.

In a news release, Par:AnoIA said the data came from an unsecured server in Tel Aviv. "The source of this release has confirmed that the data was not acquired by a hack but because it was stored on a misconfigured server and basically open for grabs," the group said.

Hactivists target corporations

Large corporations have become increasingly interested in monitoring social networks and hacker forums for indications that they may come under attack. Companies that specialize in that kind of monitoring have also been targeted by groups such as Anonymous.

HB Gary Federal, a California security consultancy, was compromised by Anonymous in 2011 after the company had researched the real identities of some Anonymous members. That breach disclosed emails describing a proposal to help Bank of America's law firm, Hunton and Williams, discredit the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

For its part, the banking industry has drawn the ire of Anonymous since it cut off payment processing of donations to WikiLeaks.

Email reveals corporate research

Par:AnoIA's data dump includes a batch of more than 500 emails with brief reports on the Occupy Wall Street movement and hacking groups such as TeaMp0isoN and UGNazi. It also contained briefings on public releases of credit-card numbers. The sources for the information were public sources, including Twitter, Pastebin, and The Pirate Bay, according to the emails.

The data also included a special file listing of four intelligence analysts who authored some of the emails, including three who work for TEKsystems and one who formerly worked for Bank of America.

All four have deleted their LinkedIn profiles, but the profiles still appear in Google's cache. One analyst's profile was live as recently as three days ago.

Par:AnoIA said its release also includes the application OneCalais, which collects unstructured information from news stories, blogs and research reports. The software is made by ClearForest, an Israeli company owned by Thomson Reuters. Officials with Thomson Reuters and ClearForest could not be immediately reached.

The compromised data also contained salary information on executives, although much of it appears to be publicly available.

From www.pcworld.com/article/2029981/bank-of-america-says-hackers-lifted-its-data-from-a-partner.html

GRINZ

Anonymous to Rally at San Francisco Court in Support of “PayPal 14” – Video - Softpedia

The individuals from “PayPal 14” – a group of activists accused of launching the 2010 cyberattacks against PayPal after the company refused to continue processing donations for WikiLeaks – are due in court on May 14.

Anonymous hacktivists have released a statement in which they urge everyone to go to the San Francisco Federal Court on May 14, at 9:30 AM, to show support for the defendants.

“Please come show your support for whistleblowers, First Amendment Rights and their heroic defenders. Bring your mask…and maybe a sign,” the hackers stated.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Anon...rt-in-Support-of-PayPal-14-Video-351032.shtml

DDoS Services Advertise Openly, Take PayPal — Krebs on Security

The past few years have brought a proliferation of online services that can be hired to knock Web sites and individual Internet users offline. Once only found advertised in shadowy underground forums, many of today’s so-called “booter” or “stresser” services are operated by U.S. citizens who openly advertise their services while hiding behind legally dubious disclaimers. Oh, and they nearly all rely on PayPal to receive payments.

Continued at http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/05/ddos-services-advertise-openly-take-paypal/

Alleged 'PayPal 14' Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison After Nearly 2 Years In Limbo

This week, the defendants -- known collectively as the "PayPal 14" -- attended a closed-door hearing in federal court in San Francisco in hopes of negotiating a settlement that could keep them out of prison. Lawyers for both sides declined to discuss the negotiations, but a joint court filing called the meeting "productive."

www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/18/paypal-14-hackers_n_3281768.html

Anonymous no more: Twitter engineer, UConn security analyst among 13 indicted for 'Operation Payback'

Not all the people named in the FBI indictment fit the hacker stereotype

By Greg Sandoval on October 8, 2013

Excerpt:

...defendant Phillip Simpson is a 28-year-old IT professional who works for a test-preparation service. Anthony Tadros, 22, is a student at the University of Connecticut, who ironically worked as a security analyst for the school, according to his LinkedIn profile. Geoffrey Commander is 65-years old. And then there's Ryan Gubele, a 27-year-old who is a former contract employee for Amazon. In June, Gubele began working as a site reliability engineer for Twitter — and is currently still employed there.

Last week, the US Department of Justice alleged in a 28-page indictment that Gubele and the other 12 defendants helped Anonymous, the hacktivist collective, cause the collapse or disruption of web sites operated by Bank of America, MasterCard and multiple global antipiracy groups. Some of the companies were attacked for refusing to process donations made to WikiLeaks, the group that published leaked US diplomatic cables. Others came under fire for supporting antipiracy efforts. Anonymous dubbed the DDoS campaign Operation Payback.

In the indictment, federal prosecutors allege that it was Gubele who aided Anonymous by tracking the effectiveness of the group's attacks on the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group for the Hollywood studios. They also accuse him of illegally accessing computer systems of at least one of the targets during Operation Payback, which occurred between September 2010 and January 2011. The indictment doesn't say whether Gubele played any role in the attack on Amazon in December 2010. According to Gubele's LinkedIn profile, he began working for the retailer in August 2010 and left the same month that Operation Payback concluded.

Gubele and Simpson did not respond to interview requests. Twitter and Amazon declined to comment. Tadros, the security analyst, said in a text: "It's in my best interest not to answer any questions about my situation while the case is ongoing."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/8/4...tter-engineer-uconn-security-analyst-among-13

I will bet dollars to doughnuts that Sabu has been very active.