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United States Sentencing Commission website hacked

209 points by throwaway2048 14y ago

nerdfiles 14y ago
"It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated."
mediocregopher 14y ago
They blackholed the dns it looks like, but http://www.ussc.gov/ http://www.ussc.gov/ is still up.
- mediocregopher 14y ago
  I grabbed the page in case that goes down too: http://pastebin.com/8sezs36b http://pastebin.com/8sezs36b
- lukeholder 14y ago
  no its not.
- vinhboy 14y ago
  I was impressed when they hacked mit.edu, but geesh, how did they get a .gov -- that's pretty crazy.
  - Tuna-Fish 14y ago
    Huh? Have you seen how the various .gov sites are being run? Their security is generally pretty pathetic. Most of their security comes from the fact that they will hit you like a ton of bricks if they catch you.
  - anonymouz 14y ago
    https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/
grey-area 14y ago
The narration seems to be in the style of v for vendetta, quite amusing to see such a portentous message on a hacked site. They've also made entire site editable. http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm
- charlieok 14y ago
  I should see that movie, just so I'll get all the references these hacktivists keep making to it. Also a lot of War Games quotes and clips in this one, for some reason (?) It plays like an intro for a videogame (warheads??). It's all so over the top. Is it too much to ask that people hijacking a website show some subtlety in their craft?
- phaus 14y ago
  Don't know if you've seen any other Anon releases, but they almost always deliver the message in this style.
  - rtaibah 14y ago
    That's true, but they are one-upping themselves with every release. I find the packaging of their message this time is very impactful. Topiary was the genius behind all the LulzSec antics, before him Anon releases lacked creativity. Topiary made anon realize the impact of PR. Is this video part of some game CGI and they just reproduced it? Or did someone do this from scratch? How much time would it take to do from scratch?
    - danabramov 14y ago
      >they are one-upping themselves with every release This! Also, I wonder what it's like to be 14 today and watch this. Anonymous would certainly make a strong impression on me if I was ten years younger.
- xendo 14y ago
  I wonder if it's entirely safe to use that link. They are probably trying to make some kind smokescreen and feed the feds with your IP addresses.
throwaway2048 14y ago
Link to video for when site is inevitably repaired https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WaPni5O2YyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...
olefoo 14y ago
Dudes. This is not at all helpful. Website defacements just create more of an excuse for a crackdown. If you're going to risk your life and freedom hacking things; make it worth your goddam time. Hack the prison industrial complex and get the evidence that shows that crimes are being created so that prisoners can be kept at a profit. Expose the email trails of corrupt judges who put away kids for kickbacks. Dox the modern plantation owners who order up prisoners to work at slave wages. Putting a press release on a website where it doesn't belong has been done; it's old news. We know you can hack a drupal site owned by the .gov, we get it. Don't blow your wad on something obvious, get documentation that would make Woodward and Bernstein cream their pants over how many pageviews it'd get and publish that. Hack the FBI and find out who was talking about killing protestors at Occupy Houston; hack Corrections Corporation of America and find out what they talk about during their board meetings; get their financials and spill them to the foreign press. Any or all of those would change things, possibly for the better. But this, this is a waste of your time and ours.
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago
  This. I think hacktivism and subsequent whistle-blowing can do good, but this is pissing in the wind.
  - vy8vWJlco 14y ago
    By that token so is voiding your ballot, but if that were the only form of expression available to you, you might be happy to be able to make even that small squeak. Voiding your ballot (and in the same way, defacing a website) sends a message to your peers and the authorities that you are dissatisfied and that alone can be solidifying. That is one of the purposes of any protest, be it disassociating yourself from an injustice or creating graffiti to propagandize for your cause. It creates, at minimum, an opportunity for a group acknowledgement of that dissatisfaction. However imperfect the expression, it can still contribute to positive change. (I would also, for example, say self-immolation is a terrible waste, but it's damn hard to dismiss. In the same way, Aaron Swartz's death says something timeless, whether he intended it or not, and however regrettable or frustrating or futile or "selfish"...) Is the sentiment of disapproval here due to one wrong being used against others (which I echo) or fear ("excuse for a crackdown")?
jlgreco 14y ago
Only tangentially on topic (but more interesting that the actual content of the video I think), but I suspect no warhead reentry shield would actually be shaped as pointy as that. Although you would think a more aerodynamic shape would reduce the drag and therefore heat of reentry, the reality is not quite so simple. In fact, the opposite is actually true. As you make the reentry shield blunter (increasing the drag coefficient as you do so) the heat load the shield needs to take actually drops. The reason for this apparently is that blunt reentry bodies form a sort of cushion of air around themselves that separates the shockwave caused by reentry from the reentry vehicle itself, insulating it. I suppose sharp pointy warheads are more theatrical though.
- biscarch 14y ago
  It has to be pointy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU
  - solarbunny 14y ago
    Good one! Is it worth watching the whole movie?
    - biscarch 14y ago
      IMO, yes. It helps if you're familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen's sense of comedy and aren't easily offended.
- KMag 14y ago
  It's important to note that the purpose of a heat shield on a warhead is significantly different from that of a manned vehicle or scientific probe. For the latter, the goal is to safely and efficiently transfer as much kinetic energy as possible (subject to acceleration limits) to the atmosphere so that parachutes will survive being deployed. For a warhead, (disregarding burrowing nukes), they don't care how much kinetic energy is expended since they don't want the warhead touching down. In fact, they would prefer to minimize the amount of time that reentry takes, and so want to minimize the amount of kinetic energy lost to heating the atmosphere. For burrowing nukes, they want the nukes traveling as fast as possible, as long as the impact won't break the nuke, which is somewhere in between the airburst and manned vehicle design cases.
sunwooz 14y ago
What exactly is the data in the warhead links?
- kristofferR 14y ago
  AES256 encrypted files, apparently juicy stuff
raverbashing 14y ago
What about the rm -rf / on the command line? Tricky, but not a lot of people know how/where to use that command line in the first place.
- nwh 14y ago
  You can't actually execute `rm -rf /` on most modern systems anyway. There's a flag to force it, but you'd have to be pretty determined to nuke your system.
  - oasisbob 14y ago
    Sure you can. (Just gave it a shot on a Ubuntu VM the other day while exploring shared library linking.) Do some systems really have a flag more forceful than -f ?
    - nwh 14y ago
      Debian: # rm -rf / rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/' rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this fail safe
      - oasisbob 14y ago
        Huh, sure enough, I stand corrected. Must have entirely forgot that I added that option while rushing to play around while things were being removed. Thanks!
  - throwaway2048 14y ago
    no but you can execute rm -rf /*
  - orvtech 14y ago
    Yes you can, btw here is a video of it being executed just for kicks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXWQriVgH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXWQriVgH8
gt5050 14y ago
The text to speech voice seems pretty good. Can anyone point out what TTS engine they might be using ?
- motyar 14y ago
  Its really impressive. Want to know too.
- dandrewsen 14y ago
  It sounds somewhat like 'Brian' http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech-voices.aspx http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech-voices.aspx
davidroberts 14y ago
Self-righteous idiots. Who made them judge and jury of the world? Do something positive.
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  Who made you the judge and jury of their actions?
- nostromo 14y ago
  USSC or Anonymous? ;)
- davidroberts 14y ago
  Essentially it's a form of terrorism. They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? A world where the best people at malicious hacking rule? The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt. Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. What if I pass them off and they decide to ruin my life. Maybe as an exercise size for one of their noobs.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    Essentially it's a form of terrorism. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
  - adamnemecek 14y ago
    >> They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. No, they are protesting events that are generally perceived as a gross injustice of the judicial system. >> They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? Says who? To me, they seem to be the very embodiment of civil disobedience (and thusly of democracy). >> The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. I don't understand how is that related to anything. Yes, a variety of things can be used for good AND BAD purposes. >> They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt. In other words, let's not remove the corrupt people because the people who would replace them COULD be corrupt as well. >> Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. The thing about fear is that it's not necessarily rational.
schappim 14y ago
Gotta love the trailing: && rm -rf / Classy ;-)
vinhboy 14y ago
They made this tweet 10 hours before it went down -- https://twitter.com/OpGJResisters/status/294901397147766784 https://twitter.com/OpGJResisters/status/294901397147766784 I wonder how this played into the hack...
ForFreedom 14y ago
One hour since, they have not restored the website.
eksith 14y ago
This will end well :/
cmina 14y ago
Screenshot of the site: http://imgur.com/fOU8BgU http://imgur.com/fOU8BgU
RossDM 14y ago
BR and FONT tags? What kind of markup is this?
- eksith 14y ago
  HTML6 ;) But seriously, I think they were either going for maximum compatibility or didn't really care.
cskau 14y ago
For others wondering; the file names refer to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme...
Claudus 14y ago
In terms of effectiveness, compared to other Anonymous campaigns, I feel pretty safe in saying the visibility of this campaign is going to be very high.
MichaelApproved 14y ago
It's been a couple of hours since the hack. How does a major gov website not have a plan to act on this quicker? I wonder if they even have an alert letting them know something happened.
- lusr 14y ago
  Given the small time window for an attack to be viable I have to wonder why a more concise and succinct message wasn't used. It does make me wonder if the bark is bigger than the bite.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Claudus 14y ago
The site contains links to 9 encrypted files, one for each of the current Supreme Court Justices. The files are intended to be concatenated into a single file named: Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256 (US-DOJ-LEA = United States - Department of Justice - Law Enforcement Agency) aes256 is apparently the encryption scheme used to encrypt the files. File names (and sizes): 1115 MB total Scalia.Warhead1 (150 MB) Kennedy.Warhead1 (108 MB) Thomas.Warhead1 (150 MB) Ginsburg.Warhead1 (150 MB) Breyer.Warhead1 (150 MB) Roberts.Warhead1 (23 MB) Alito.Warhead1 (150 MB) Sotomayor.Warhead1 (101 MB) Kagan.Warhead1 (133 MB) Relevant quotes pertaining to the file contents: The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Should we be forced to reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be collateral damage. It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated. Summary: the file contains "various secret contents", the file has one encryption key to reveal all data, they intend to release previews of the data, they may not release the encryption key (although chances of this seem unlikely). The encrypted data is almost certainly larger than the unencrypted data, my guess is the unencrypted data is closer to 600MB to 900MB (In the ballpark of the size of a standard 700MB data CD). Initially I thought the 9 files may contain data about each of the SC Justices, or perhaps information intended for each of them. However, I think their names on files were simply chosen for effect.
- Claudus 14y ago
  https://twitter.com/aestetix/status/295121141805223937 https://twitter.com/aestetix/status/295121141805223937 Based on http://66.153.19.162/clarity1.txt http://66.153.19.162/clarity1.txt through clarity3.txt, it looks like NIH docs.
  - tobylane 14y ago
    That second link is down, what was it?
- nwh 14y ago
  There's something strange about those file sizes. If they were a split set, wouldn't they all be the same size except for one? The only explanation I can think of is the data was `tar`d, then `split`, then compressed (to make the varying sizes), then encrypted, which seems more than a little insane. The files are Base64 encoded, which means they are considerably larger than their equivalent binary.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Claudus 14y ago
Here's the introduction from "Anonymous Operation Last Resort 101" *1. Welcome to #OpLastResort-TwitterStorm! You have been selected to assist this important Operation because we're pretty sure you know how to cut and paste. #OpLastResort is a long-term Op devoted to honoring the memory of Aaron Swartz and continuing his important work. Anonymous has prepared content that they would like shared with the world, and it's up to us to make sure it goes everywhere. Other Operatives will be spreading the news to major MSM outlets, YouTube, Facebook, and other websites while you participate in the push to bypass the bias and get the word out directly to the people via Twitter." (Further details: http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263 http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263)
ArchD 14y ago
I notice that justice.gov is down.
littletables 14y ago
The site has been dropped from DNS but IP still returns. The mirrors are slow/down, and file keys are the extortion: http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us-sentencing-commission-distributes-files-7000010369/ http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us-sentencing-commissio...
tokenadult 14y ago
[Shakes his head in disgust.] Hackers, it's time for me to hack the discussion. You and your first world problems have NO IDEA how to fight for freedom. This is the wimpy way to protest whatever it is you are protesting. Unlike most people who post here, I have actually lived under a dictatorial regime that ruled a territory that later had a peaceful transition to democracy and legally protected civil rights. Anonymous or whatever the name of the latest Western hacktivist group is going about things all wrong. If you really want to learn about effective popular action to bring about more freedom, point your Web browser to the Albert Einstein Institute publications http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html and choose your language for titles like From Dictatorship to Democracy and The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle and others. Note that the main author of these publications has consulted with freedom movements all over the world and has had notable success in the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, and other countries, and is credited with much of the mobilization of the two-year-old Arab Spring movement. Going after the United States Sentencing Commission website is beyond stupid. The federal sentencing guidelines were a helpful reform. Before they were adopted, on the example of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines, federal sentences were just about wholly indeterminate, making each judge could make up his or her own law of sentencing at trial. The Minnesota reform, which was the example for the federal reform, set up guidelines based on a "severity score" of the offense--so that for the first time legislative statutes from many different decades were compared as to the actual social harm resulting from each offense, based on community standards as of the time of the reform--and on a "criminal history score" of the offender, so that prison time was reserved only for the most dangerous repeat offenders. (Minnesota imprisons fewer convicted criminals than most states of the United States, being much like Scandinavia in this regard. Minnesota spends more dollars per prisoner but fewer dollars per taxpayer on its prison system than almost any other state.) I know actual freedom fighters, that is publishers of opposition magazines and organizers of nonviolent protests, from Taiwan. Some of them experienced hard prison time while in the struggle for freedom, with family break up and ill health and the other consequences of imprisonment. But today they can look at a much freer country in their homeland than they grew up in. The biggest problem with website-defacing movements is their cowardice (no one in Anonymous seems courageous enough to go to prison) and lack of perspective (they complain about first world problems that they mischaracterize as important problems for the common people). It's time for the discussion on Hacker News to grow up and make more room for the real freedom fighters.
ComputerGuru 14y ago
Does anyone have a pic of what it looked like? It is down now. (DNS doesn't resolve).
- josh_blum 14y ago
  Google cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ussc.gov/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
fkeel1 14y ago
Somewhat off topic, but this has been bothering me for a while now: about the role of aaron swartz in all this... initially I read he was facing "up to 35 years" in prison. After his death people started speaking of "up to 50 years". In relation to the USSC hack I have started seeing 50+ years pop up. I feel like these exaggerations do not do anyone any good. The actual facts are horrible enough - bloating them up like that does not support his cause, rather, imo might undermine it, as it reduces the credibility of anyone arguing his case.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  35 years was the maximum under the laws he was originally charged with. 50 years was the maximum after the supplemental indictment that added additional charges. Under the sentencing guidelines a judge shouldn't, but still could have sentenced him to the maximum. If the goal is to change the law and the argument is that the penalties are absurd, the fact that the penalties are absurd is very relevant and not an exaggeration.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    "Win the lottery and you could receive up to $200 million!!! Buy your ticket today!!!" And yet we say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math...
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the sentencing guidelines based on the maximum penalty? In other words, the absurdity of 50 years in theory is what creates the absurdity of seven or ten years in practice. If the maximum penalty was one year or less then the guidelines would have discounted that to something entirely rational for cases like Aaron Swartz, but it wasn't, causing the disproportionality. Buying a $1 lottery ticket would be a whole lot more rational if the rare case resulting in $200M caused the average case to result in $35M.
      - mpyne 14y ago
oftenwrong 14y ago
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_-_Operation_Last_Resort http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_-_...
berlinbrown 14y ago
The cool thing about hacking government sites. No one will be in the office on the weekend.
charonn0 14y ago
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/
rebrane 14y ago
I don't want any reforms that come from blackmail and extortion. Any good that they would do would be wiped out once the really powerful extortionists show up. By all means, though, let's see what's in those files.
- KMag 14y ago
  I don't think they actually expect (or fully want, for that matter) their demands to be met before they release the decryption keys. They want to be seen as confident enough to present a deal, but their ultimate power trip fantasy is to see powerful people forced to resign from office, and then for the reforms to happen after the destruction has happened. Also, would it have killed them to provide sha-3, or at least sha-1 or md5 sums? People are speculating here (and presumably elsewhere) that some of the uploads were corrupted.

209 points by throwaway2048 14y ago

nerdfiles 14y ago

"It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated."

mediocregopher 14y ago

They blackholed the dns it looks like, but http://www.ussc.gov/ http://www.ussc.gov/ is still up.

mediocregopher 14y ago
I grabbed the page in case that goes down too: http://pastebin.com/8sezs36b http://pastebin.com/8sezs36b
lukeholder 14y ago
no its not.
vinhboy 14y ago
I was impressed when they hacked mit.edu, but geesh, how did they get a .gov -- that's pretty crazy.
- Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  Huh? Have you seen how the various .gov sites are being run? Their security is generally pretty pathetic. Most of their security comes from the fact that they will hit you like a ton of bricks if they catch you.
- anonymouz 14y ago
  https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/

grey-area 14y ago

The narration seems to be in the style of v for vendetta, quite amusing to see such a portentous message on a hacked site. They've also made entire site editable. http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm

charlieok 14y ago
I should see that movie, just so I'll get all the references these hacktivists keep making to it. Also a lot of War Games quotes and clips in this one, for some reason (?) It plays like an intro for a videogame (warheads??). It's all so over the top. Is it too much to ask that people hijacking a website show some subtlety in their craft?
phaus 14y ago
Don't know if you've seen any other Anon releases, but they almost always deliver the message in this style.
- rtaibah 14y ago
  That's true, but they are one-upping themselves with every release. I find the packaging of their message this time is very impactful. Topiary was the genius behind all the LulzSec antics, before him Anon releases lacked creativity. Topiary made anon realize the impact of PR. Is this video part of some game CGI and they just reproduced it? Or did someone do this from scratch? How much time would it take to do from scratch?
  - danabramov 14y ago
    >they are one-upping themselves with every release This! Also, I wonder what it's like to be 14 today and watch this. Anonymous would certainly make a strong impression on me if I was ten years younger.
xendo 14y ago
I wonder if it's entirely safe to use that link. They are probably trying to make some kind smokescreen and feed the feds with your IP addresses.

throwaway2048 14y ago

Link to video for when site is inevitably repaired https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WaPni5O2YyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...

olefoo 14y ago

Dudes. This is not at all helpful. Website defacements just create more of an excuse for a crackdown. If you're going to risk your life and freedom hacking things; make it worth your goddam time. Hack the prison industrial complex and get the evidence that shows that crimes are being created so that prisoners can be kept at a profit. Expose the email trails of corrupt judges who put away kids for kickbacks. Dox the modern plantation owners who order up prisoners to work at slave wages. Putting a press release on a website where it doesn't belong has been done; it's old news. We know you can hack a drupal site owned by the .gov, we get it. Don't blow your wad on something obvious, get documentation that would make Woodward and Bernstein cream their pants over how many pageviews it'd get and publish that. Hack the FBI and find out who was talking about killing protestors at Occupy Houston; hack Corrections Corporation of America and find out what they talk about during their board meetings; get their financials and spill them to the foreign press. Any or all of those would change things, possibly for the better. But this, this is a waste of your time and ours.

knowaveragejoe 14y ago
This. I think hacktivism and subsequent whistle-blowing can do good, but this is pissing in the wind.
- vy8vWJlco 14y ago
  By that token so is voiding your ballot, but if that were the only form of expression available to you, you might be happy to be able to make even that small squeak. Voiding your ballot (and in the same way, defacing a website) sends a message to your peers and the authorities that you are dissatisfied and that alone can be solidifying. That is one of the purposes of any protest, be it disassociating yourself from an injustice or creating graffiti to propagandize for your cause. It creates, at minimum, an opportunity for a group acknowledgement of that dissatisfaction. However imperfect the expression, it can still contribute to positive change. (I would also, for example, say self-immolation is a terrible waste, but it's damn hard to dismiss. In the same way, Aaron Swartz's death says something timeless, whether he intended it or not, and however regrettable or frustrating or futile or "selfish"...) Is the sentiment of disapproval here due to one wrong being used against others (which I echo) or fear ("excuse for a crackdown")?

jlgreco 14y ago

Only tangentially on topic (but more interesting that the actual content of the video I think), but I suspect no warhead reentry shield would actually be shaped as pointy as that. Although you would think a more aerodynamic shape would reduce the drag and therefore heat of reentry, the reality is not quite so simple. In fact, the opposite is actually true. As you make the reentry shield blunter (increasing the drag coefficient as you do so) the heat load the shield needs to take actually drops. The reason for this apparently is that blunt reentry bodies form a sort of cushion of air around themselves that separates the shockwave caused by reentry from the reentry vehicle itself, insulating it. I suppose sharp pointy warheads are more theatrical though.

biscarch 14y ago
It has to be pointy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU
- solarbunny 14y ago
  Good one! Is it worth watching the whole movie?
  - biscarch 14y ago
    IMO, yes. It helps if you're familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen's sense of comedy and aren't easily offended.
KMag 14y ago
It's important to note that the purpose of a heat shield on a warhead is significantly different from that of a manned vehicle or scientific probe. For the latter, the goal is to safely and efficiently transfer as much kinetic energy as possible (subject to acceleration limits) to the atmosphere so that parachutes will survive being deployed. For a warhead, (disregarding burrowing nukes), they don't care how much kinetic energy is expended since they don't want the warhead touching down. In fact, they would prefer to minimize the amount of time that reentry takes, and so want to minimize the amount of kinetic energy lost to heating the atmosphere. For burrowing nukes, they want the nukes traveling as fast as possible, as long as the impact won't break the nuke, which is somewhere in between the airburst and manned vehicle design cases.

sunwooz 14y ago

What exactly is the data in the warhead links?

kristofferR 14y ago
AES256 encrypted files, apparently juicy stuff

raverbashing 14y ago

What about the rm -rf / on the command line? Tricky, but not a lot of people know how/where to use that command line in the first place.

nwh 14y ago
You can't actually execute `rm -rf /` on most modern systems anyway. There's a flag to force it, but you'd have to be pretty determined to nuke your system.
- oasisbob 14y ago
  Sure you can. (Just gave it a shot on a Ubuntu VM the other day while exploring shared library linking.) Do some systems really have a flag more forceful than -f ?
  - nwh 14y ago
    Debian: # rm -rf / rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/' rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this fail safe
    - oasisbob 14y ago
      Huh, sure enough, I stand corrected. Must have entirely forgot that I added that option while rushing to play around while things were being removed. Thanks!
- throwaway2048 14y ago
  no but you can execute rm -rf /*
- orvtech 14y ago
  Yes you can, btw here is a video of it being executed just for kicks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXWQriVgH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXWQriVgH8

gt5050 14y ago

The text to speech voice seems pretty good. Can anyone point out what TTS engine they might be using ?

motyar 14y ago
Its really impressive. Want to know too.
dandrewsen 14y ago
It sounds somewhat like 'Brian' http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech-voices.aspx http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech-voices.aspx

davidroberts 14y ago

Self-righteous idiots. Who made them judge and jury of the world? Do something positive.

adamnemecek 14y ago
Who made you the judge and jury of their actions?
nostromo 14y ago
USSC or Anonymous? ;)
davidroberts 14y ago
Essentially it's a form of terrorism. They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? A world where the best people at malicious hacking rule? The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt. Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. What if I pass them off and they decide to ruin my life. Maybe as an exercise size for one of their noobs.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Essentially it's a form of terrorism. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  >> They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. No, they are protesting events that are generally perceived as a gross injustice of the judicial system. >> They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? Says who? To me, they seem to be the very embodiment of civil disobedience (and thusly of democracy). >> The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. I don't understand how is that related to anything. Yes, a variety of things can be used for good AND BAD purposes. >> They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt. In other words, let's not remove the corrupt people because the people who would replace them COULD be corrupt as well. >> Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. The thing about fear is that it's not necessarily rational.

schappim 14y ago

Gotta love the trailing: && rm -rf / Classy ;-)

vinhboy 14y ago

They made this tweet 10 hours before it went down -- https://twitter.com/OpGJResisters/status/294901397147766784 https://twitter.com/OpGJResisters/status/294901397147766784 I wonder how this played into the hack...

ForFreedom 14y ago

One hour since, they have not restored the website.

eksith 14y ago

This will end well :/

cmina 14y ago

Screenshot of the site: http://imgur.com/fOU8BgU http://imgur.com/fOU8BgU

RossDM 14y ago

BR and FONT tags? What kind of markup is this?

eksith 14y ago
HTML6 ;) But seriously, I think they were either going for maximum compatibility or didn't really care.

cskau 14y ago

For others wondering; the file names refer to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme...

Claudus 14y ago

In terms of effectiveness, compared to other Anonymous campaigns, I feel pretty safe in saying the visibility of this campaign is going to be very high.

MichaelApproved 14y ago

It's been a couple of hours since the hack. How does a major gov website not have a plan to act on this quicker? I wonder if they even have an alert letting them know something happened.

lusr 14y ago
Given the small time window for an attack to be viable I have to wonder why a more concise and succinct message wasn't used. It does make me wonder if the bark is bigger than the bite.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Claudus 14y ago

The site contains links to 9 encrypted files, one for each of the current Supreme Court Justices. The files are intended to be concatenated into a single file named: Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256 (US-DOJ-LEA = United States - Department of Justice - Law Enforcement Agency) aes256 is apparently the encryption scheme used to encrypt the files. File names (and sizes): 1115 MB total Scalia.Warhead1 (150 MB) Kennedy.Warhead1 (108 MB) Thomas.Warhead1 (150 MB) Ginsburg.Warhead1 (150 MB) Breyer.Warhead1 (150 MB) Roberts.Warhead1 (23 MB) Alito.Warhead1 (150 MB) Sotomayor.Warhead1 (101 MB) Kagan.Warhead1 (133 MB) Relevant quotes pertaining to the file contents: The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Should we be forced to reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be collateral damage. It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated. Summary: the file contains "various secret contents", the file has one encryption key to reveal all data, they intend to release previews of the data, they may not release the encryption key (although chances of this seem unlikely). The encrypted data is almost certainly larger than the unencrypted data, my guess is the unencrypted data is closer to 600MB to 900MB (In the ballpark of the size of a standard 700MB data CD). Initially I thought the 9 files may contain data about each of the SC Justices, or perhaps information intended for each of them. However, I think their names on files were simply chosen for effect.

Claudus 14y ago
https://twitter.com/aestetix/status/295121141805223937 https://twitter.com/aestetix/status/295121141805223937 Based on http://66.153.19.162/clarity1.txt http://66.153.19.162/clarity1.txt through clarity3.txt, it looks like NIH docs.
- tobylane 14y ago
  That second link is down, what was it?
nwh 14y ago
There's something strange about those file sizes. If they were a split set, wouldn't they all be the same size except for one? The only explanation I can think of is the data was `tar`d, then `split`, then compressed (to make the varying sizes), then encrypted, which seems more than a little insane. The files are Base64 encoded, which means they are considerably larger than their equivalent binary.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Claudus 14y ago

Here's the introduction from "Anonymous Operation Last Resort 101" *1. Welcome to #OpLastResort-TwitterStorm! You have been selected to assist this important Operation because we're pretty sure you know how to cut and paste. #OpLastResort is a long-term Op devoted to honoring the memory of Aaron Swartz and continuing his important work. Anonymous has prepared content that they would like shared with the world, and it's up to us to make sure it goes everywhere. Other Operatives will be spreading the news to major MSM outlets, YouTube, Facebook, and other websites while you participate in the push to bypass the bias and get the word out directly to the people via Twitter." (Further details: http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263 http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263)

ArchD 14y ago

I notice that justice.gov is down.

littletables 14y ago

The site has been dropped from DNS but IP still returns. The mirrors are slow/down, and file keys are the extortion: http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us-sentencing-commission-distributes-files-7000010369/ http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us-sentencing-commissio...

tokenadult 14y ago

[Shakes his head in disgust.] Hackers, it's time for me to hack the discussion. You and your first world problems have NO IDEA how to fight for freedom. This is the wimpy way to protest whatever it is you are protesting. Unlike most people who post here, I have actually lived under a dictatorial regime that ruled a territory that later had a peaceful transition to democracy and legally protected civil rights. Anonymous or whatever the name of the latest Western hacktivist group is going about things all wrong. If you really want to learn about effective popular action to bring about more freedom, point your Web browser to the Albert Einstein Institute publications http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html and choose your language for titles like From Dictatorship to Democracy and The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle and others. Note that the main author of these publications has consulted with freedom movements all over the world and has had notable success in the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, and other countries, and is credited with much of the mobilization of the two-year-old Arab Spring movement. Going after the United States Sentencing Commission website is beyond stupid. The federal sentencing guidelines were a helpful reform. Before they were adopted, on the example of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines, federal sentences were just about wholly indeterminate, making each judge could make up his or her own law of sentencing at trial. The Minnesota reform, which was the example for the federal reform, set up guidelines based on a "severity score" of the offense--so that for the first time legislative statutes from many different decades were compared as to the actual social harm resulting from each offense, based on community standards as of the time of the reform--and on a "criminal history score" of the offender, so that prison time was reserved only for the most dangerous repeat offenders. (Minnesota imprisons fewer convicted criminals than most states of the United States, being much like Scandinavia in this regard. Minnesota spends more dollars per prisoner but fewer dollars per taxpayer on its prison system than almost any other state.) I know actual freedom fighters, that is publishers of opposition magazines and organizers of nonviolent protests, from Taiwan. Some of them experienced hard prison time while in the struggle for freedom, with family break up and ill health and the other consequences of imprisonment. But today they can look at a much freer country in their homeland than they grew up in. The biggest problem with website-defacing movements is their cowardice (no one in Anonymous seems courageous enough to go to prison) and lack of perspective (they complain about first world problems that they mischaracterize as important problems for the common people). It's time for the discussion on Hacker News to grow up and make more room for the real freedom fighters.

ComputerGuru 14y ago

Does anyone have a pic of what it looked like? It is down now. (DNS doesn't resolve).

josh_blum 14y ago
Google cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ussc.gov/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

fkeel1 14y ago

Somewhat off topic, but this has been bothering me for a while now: about the role of aaron swartz in all this... initially I read he was facing "up to 35 years" in prison. After his death people started speaking of "up to 50 years". In relation to the USSC hack I have started seeing 50+ years pop up. I feel like these exaggerations do not do anyone any good. The actual facts are horrible enough - bloating them up like that does not support his cause, rather, imo might undermine it, as it reduces the credibility of anyone arguing his case.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
35 years was the maximum under the laws he was originally charged with. 50 years was the maximum after the supplemental indictment that added additional charges. Under the sentencing guidelines a judge shouldn't, but still could have sentenced him to the maximum. If the goal is to change the law and the argument is that the penalties are absurd, the fact that the penalties are absurd is very relevant and not an exaggeration.
- mpyne 14y ago
  "Win the lottery and you could receive up to $200 million!!! Buy your ticket today!!!" And yet we say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math...
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the sentencing guidelines based on the maximum penalty? In other words, the absurdity of 50 years in theory is what creates the absurdity of seven or ten years in practice. If the maximum penalty was one year or less then the guidelines would have discounted that to something entirely rational for cases like Aaron Swartz, but it wasn't, causing the disproportionality. Buying a $1 lottery ticket would be a whole lot more rational if the rare case resulting in $200M caused the average case to result in $35M.
    - mpyne 14y ago

oftenwrong 14y ago

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_-_Operation_Last_Resort http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_-_...

berlinbrown 14y ago

The cool thing about hacking government sites. No one will be in the office on the weekend.

charonn0 14y ago

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/

rebrane 14y ago

I don't want any reforms that come from blackmail and extortion. Any good that they would do would be wiped out once the really powerful extortionists show up. By all means, though, let's see what's in those files.

KMag 14y ago
I don't think they actually expect (or fully want, for that matter) their demands to be met before they release the decryption keys. They want to be seen as confident enough to present a deal, but their ultimate power trip fantasy is to see powerful people forced to resign from office, and then for the reforms to happen after the destruction has happened. Also, would it have killed them to provide sha-3, or at least sha-1 or md5 sums? People are speculating here (and presumably elsewhere) that some of the uploads were corrupted.