6 ms·

Anonymous hackers re-emerge amid US unrest

28 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

DevKoala 6y ago
> But generally, they are activists, taking aim at those they accuse of misusing power. They do so in very public ways, such as hijacking websites or forcing them offline. Not sure about that.
- tw000001 6y ago
  When you're an activist, everyone else looks like an activist too. This is one of the problems with journalists who take sides: activist journalists see everything as a struggle and are incapable of even recognizing trolling.
bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
Relevant post by Troy Hunt which debunks the claim that Anonymous "hacked" the Minneapolis Police Department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382427
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Hacking attribution in the US is a total crap show. Really it's terrible. I have no idea why we ever trust government attribution. For example, the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank": a hacked payment TOS in the lobby sending spam. You can't make it up, it's really is this dumb. How about the attribution of the DNC "hack" in light of Crowdstrike's declassified congressional testimony? Is there a reason nobody from our government has asked Assange? I mean, he's been pretty easy to find.
  - codezero 6y ago
    It's not clear if you're missing some context. Nobody mentioned the government, and Troy Hunt is the owner of Have I Been Pwned - he's pretty authoritative and trustworthy when it comes to breaches, mainly because he has the largest dataset (as far as I am aware) of known breached accounts, so can connect dots that others cannot.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    For those interested (or thinking a citation is needed), here is a summary from Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi... They conclude that the claim of the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank" is "Unproven", as of 2017 at least: "In March 2017, CNN reported that the issue was still under investigation by the FBI, but nothing substantive had yet been turned up"
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      Since most of hacker news is technically advanced, I'd encourage you all to take a look at the data and determine exactly "what" the back channel was (maybe a secret IRC server??). First you have to find it, since it's buried in MSM reports and "maaaaybe it's true but who knows??" articles.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Can you elaborate, regarding your last paragraph?
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump. This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses." But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? Even if they offered some sort of deal involving immunity from US prosecution, it's unlikely that Assange would have had any proof that the source of the emails was the Russian government. (Also, incriminating the Russian government in a crime can have negative effects on your life expectancy). As for your statistics, it's worth noting that Mueller's investigation probably made a profit by uncovering millions of dollars worth of tax fraud[0], and it lead to indictments of or guilty pleas from 34 people and 3 companies.[1] That doesn't seem like it was a complete waste of time or money. [0] https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigation-profit-tax-fraud-cost/ https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigati... [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...
        ed25519FUUU 6y ago
        > Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? I'm just wondering why they never bothered to ask? I mean, he committed the crime, why not interview him?
  - wafn 6y ago
    But but but... there was Cyrillic in the metadata of an attached Word document, and the timestamp matched working hours in Moscow! That's all you need for years of investigation, isn't it?
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Quote: "What we almost certainly have here is the result of someone selecting every http://ci.minneapolis.mn.us http://ci.minneapolis.mn.us email address from old breaches or credential stuffing lists and passing it off as something it isn't. There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest this is legitimate."
sandworm101 6y ago
>>"hacktivist" group Anonymous has returned from the shadows. >>the group has targeted groups over race relations in the past. >>The "hacktivist" collective has no face, and no leadership. Its tagline is simply "we are legion", referring to its allegedly large numbers of individuals. A decade later and the media still doesn't understand anonymous. It never is a group. It is mask, a word, used by any number of different groups at different times. One should never ascribe any group identity to anonymous, no more than one would group individuals who choose to wear a particular color of hat.
- gindely 6y ago
  Yes the article attempting to determine if this had the signature of something "genuinely" anonymous demonstrates a clear void of space between the author and the point. An attack is a genuinely anonymous if it is anonymous and uses certain imagery. Clearly, the video and the UN hack are anonymous. Whether or not the police website going down was from them or not, who knows. Whether the anonymous attack was perpetrated by American acktivists or whether it was perpetrated by state actors is a different question. But there's no point asking "is it genuinely anonymous"; rather, ask "was it genuinely instate disaffection or is it concocted interstate action". (They don't ask that question. They don't get close. But the only questions worth asking are this one and "who did it".)
  - marcoperaza 6y ago
    I agree, but one friendly nit-pick: capitalized "Anonymous" is the hacktivist thing, and lower-case "anonymous" is the ordinary adjective. People acting as Anonymous are also anonymous, but not everyone acting anonymously is Anonymous.
- _understanding 6y ago
  Journalists do apply the same mistaken conceptualization to "black bloc" tactics employed by individuals dressing in black and carrying big black umbrellas. It's not a single homogeneous, coordinated/regimented organization or even an irregular gang affiliation. It's an equipment choice. Yet we have people writing about "the black bloc" doing this or that, as if that were informative. It's strange how easily corporate media outlets can be short-circuiuted and subverted to produce an almost robotic, knee-jerk reflex, when attempting to cover a story. It's not even Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's more akin to a kindergartner explaining fidget spinners to grandma.
sacks2k 6y ago
Anonymous: A sloppy group of script kiddies that only have the power to terrorize children on Ring cameras and vandalize decades old websites that nobody cares about. The irony is that since since they claim they are all the same, we can blame everyone in the group for the actions of a few.
skilled 6y ago
Hard to believe BBC gave a green light to this column considering the recent publishing's have been public knowledge, including the so-called hack. Twitter has become a disease in the last few months and most of this stuff originates from there.

28 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

> But generally, they are activists, taking aim at those they accuse of misusing power. They do so in very public ways, such as hijacking websites or forcing them offline. Not sure about that.

tw000001 6y ago
When you're an activist, everyone else looks like an activist too. This is one of the problems with journalists who take sides: activist journalists see everything as a struggle and are incapable of even recognizing trolling.

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago

Relevant post by Troy Hunt which debunks the claim that Anonymous "hacked" the Minneapolis Police Department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382427

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Hacking attribution in the US is a total crap show. Really it's terrible. I have no idea why we ever trust government attribution. For example, the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank": a hacked payment TOS in the lobby sending spam. You can't make it up, it's really is this dumb. How about the attribution of the DNC "hack" in light of Crowdstrike's declassified congressional testimony? Is there a reason nobody from our government has asked Assange? I mean, he's been pretty easy to find.
- codezero 6y ago
  It's not clear if you're missing some context. Nobody mentioned the government, and Troy Hunt is the owner of Have I Been Pwned - he's pretty authoritative and trustworthy when it comes to breaches, mainly because he has the largest dataset (as far as I am aware) of known breached accounts, so can connect dots that others cannot.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  For those interested (or thinking a citation is needed), here is a summary from Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi... They conclude that the claim of the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank" is "Unproven", as of 2017 at least: "In March 2017, CNN reported that the issue was still under investigation by the FBI, but nothing substantive had yet been turned up"
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Since most of hacker news is technically advanced, I'd encourage you all to take a look at the data and determine exactly "what" the back channel was (maybe a secret IRC server??). First you have to find it, since it's buried in MSM reports and "maaaaybe it's true but who knows??" articles.
- meowface 6y ago
  Can you elaborate, regarding your last paragraph?
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump. This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses." But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? Even if they offered some sort of deal involving immunity from US prosecution, it's unlikely that Assange would have had any proof that the source of the emails was the Russian government. (Also, incriminating the Russian government in a crime can have negative effects on your life expectancy). As for your statistics, it's worth noting that Mueller's investigation probably made a profit by uncovering millions of dollars worth of tax fraud[0], and it lead to indictments of or guilty pleas from 34 people and 3 companies.[1] That doesn't seem like it was a complete waste of time or money. [0] https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigation-profit-tax-fraud-cost/ https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigati... [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...
      - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
        > Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? I'm just wondering why they never bothered to ask? I mean, he committed the crime, why not interview him?
- wafn 6y ago
  But but but... there was Cyrillic in the metadata of an attached Word document, and the timestamp matched working hours in Moscow! That's all you need for years of investigation, isn't it?
floatingatoll 6y ago
Quote: "What we almost certainly have here is the result of someone selecting every http://ci.minneapolis.mn.us http://ci.minneapolis.mn.us email address from old breaches or credential stuffing lists and passing it off as something it isn't. There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest this is legitimate."

sandworm101 6y ago

>>"hacktivist" group Anonymous has returned from the shadows. >>the group has targeted groups over race relations in the past. >>The "hacktivist" collective has no face, and no leadership. Its tagline is simply "we are legion", referring to its allegedly large numbers of individuals. A decade later and the media still doesn't understand anonymous. It never is a group. It is mask, a word, used by any number of different groups at different times. One should never ascribe any group identity to anonymous, no more than one would group individuals who choose to wear a particular color of hat.

gindely 6y ago
Yes the article attempting to determine if this had the signature of something "genuinely" anonymous demonstrates a clear void of space between the author and the point. An attack is a genuinely anonymous if it is anonymous and uses certain imagery. Clearly, the video and the UN hack are anonymous. Whether or not the police website going down was from them or not, who knows. Whether the anonymous attack was perpetrated by American acktivists or whether it was perpetrated by state actors is a different question. But there's no point asking "is it genuinely anonymous"; rather, ask "was it genuinely instate disaffection or is it concocted interstate action". (They don't ask that question. They don't get close. But the only questions worth asking are this one and "who did it".)
- marcoperaza 6y ago
  I agree, but one friendly nit-pick: capitalized "Anonymous" is the hacktivist thing, and lower-case "anonymous" is the ordinary adjective. People acting as Anonymous are also anonymous, but not everyone acting anonymously is Anonymous.
_understanding 6y ago
Journalists do apply the same mistaken conceptualization to "black bloc" tactics employed by individuals dressing in black and carrying big black umbrellas. It's not a single homogeneous, coordinated/regimented organization or even an irregular gang affiliation. It's an equipment choice. Yet we have people writing about "the black bloc" doing this or that, as if that were informative. It's strange how easily corporate media outlets can be short-circuiuted and subverted to produce an almost robotic, knee-jerk reflex, when attempting to cover a story. It's not even Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's more akin to a kindergartner explaining fidget spinners to grandma.

sacks2k 6y ago

Anonymous: A sloppy group of script kiddies that only have the power to terrorize children on Ring cameras and vandalize decades old websites that nobody cares about. The irony is that since since they claim they are all the same, we can blame everyone in the group for the actions of a few.

skilled 6y ago

Hard to believe BBC gave a green light to this column considering the recent publishing's have been public knowledge, including the so-called hack. Twitter has become a disease in the last few months and most of this stuff originates from there.