Hacking // Current TV

Anonymous OpUSA: Massive Cyber Attack Planned For Wednesday Against Government and Banks

The hacktivist collective Anonymous, along with other hacker groups based in the Middle East and North Africa, began an operation, dubbed "OpUSA," targeting the websites of nine major U.S. government agencies and over 130 banks earlier this morning in a protest against American foreign policy. Targets include the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the White House, along with the websites of banks such as Bank of America, Capital One and TD Bank. Calling themselves the "N4m3le55 Cr3w," the collective of hacker groups said in a statement that it aims to make sure "this May 7th will be a day to remember."

The relatively amorphous Anonymous, a decentralized and loosely associated collective of hackers, grew out of the internet imageboard 4Chan back in the early 2000s. As the very interesting and informative 2012 documentary on the group, "We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists," highlights, there is no one group called Anonymous with one set of goals or ideals. Rather there are a collection of groups and individuals that operate under the name Anonymous, often with varying agendas ranging from principle social activism to just messing with people because they can. Because of this, their actions can range from the awesome (such as their support for protesters during the Arab uprisings) to the simply mean and unnecessary (such as posting flashing animations on the website of an epilepsy support group).

Anonymous is joined by groups including the Izz al-Din Qassam Cyber Fighters, whose sole aim is apparently to get the "Innocence of Muslims" video removed from YouTube. Other groups involved in OpUSA include Mauritania hackers, Muslim liberation army, antisec, and lulzsec. Over the past six months, the Qassam Cyber Fighters have successfully carried out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against large American banks. The groups have been publicizing their planned operation for weeks now, and in their statement posted on the website Pastebin on April 21 they said that America will pay for the war crimes it has committed:

"America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently you have committed war crimes in your own country. You have killed hundreds of innocent children and families with drones, guns, and now bombs. America you have hit thousands of people where it hurts them, now it is our time for our Lulz. For this you shall pay."The hacktivist collective Anonymous, along with other hacker groups based in the... more

hawk5000
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The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it

Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

"I think it's important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What's unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That's not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don't just complain about the Swartz case. Don't just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country - mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

More at link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymousAaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and... more

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ANONYMOUS HACKTIVIST JEREMY HAMMOND'S BETRAYAL & ARREST 1 YEAR LATER

Excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine December 7, 2012: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy... more

johnnyTremaine
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How to be a Good Hacker

How can one become a good hacker and do only good things, read this blog to find out... more

blastarorion
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Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense |

Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the... more

figgdimension
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Aaron Swartz: The genius and suicide of an Internet activist

Aaron Swartz, internet activist and computer programer (he helped create an early... more

ringinginmyears
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Cross-VM Side-channel attacks against cryptography keys

[[ Cross-VM Side-channel attacks against cryptography keys ]] fA group of researchers... more

thehackernews9 [removed]
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NBC website hacked

Mobile version of Official NBC website and NBC Sports Rotoworld forums are currently... more

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ImageShack Server and Symantec Database hacked

EXCLUSIVE -- ImageShack Server and Symantec Database hacked and Dumped using some zero... more

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28,000 Paypal Accounts hacked by Anonymous Hackers

[ OVERVIEW of Guy Fawkes Day (5th November 2012) ] Hack of 28,000 Paypal Accounts,... more

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Anonymous Hackers hacked into "Telecom Italy"

"Please don't mind, its 5th of November" slogan for today !... more

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Coca-Cola hacked

In 2009, the FBI told Coca-Cola executives that hackers had broken into their computer... more

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Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds | Danger Room | Wired.com

This isn’t the only vulnerability in the drone fleet. In March of 2011, an unknown software glitch caused a Predator stationed at a U.S. base in Africa to start its engine without human direction. Last October, as Danger Room first reported, Air Force technicians discovered a virus infecting the drones’ remote cockpits in Las Vegas. It took weeks of sustained effort to clean up the machines. The aircraft, which rely on GPS to guide them through the air, can run into problems if GPS signals are jammed in a particular area — something that can be done with cheap, commercially available hardware. Iranian officials claimed they hacked the GPS control signal of an advanced drone, though it’s impossible to verify that lofty claim.

No one who works with UAVs is questioning the fundamental integrity of the drone fleet at the moment; it would take an incredibly sophisticated hacker to commandeer a Predator, for example. Nor is anyone pretending that this premiere tool of the U.S.global counterterror campaign is flawless.

Predators and the larger, better-armed Reapers transmit video and accept instructions in one of two ways. The first is via satellite, to remote pilots and sensor operators who are often on the other side of the planet; these satellite communications are encrypted, and are generally considered secure.

The second is through a radio frequency signal called the Common Data Link, which is used to share the drone’s video feed with troops on the ground. The CDL’s carrier signal — its specific pattern of frequencies, in a given order and for a given length of time — tells both transmitter and receiver on how to function. The problem is that the Predators’ version of the CDL carrier signal (also known as a “waveform”) didn’t include an order to encrypt the signal. So neither the transmitter on the drone nor the receivers that troops used on the ground employed encryption, either.

There were reasons for this. The original Predator, just 27 feet long, was little more than a scaled-up model plane with an 85-horsepower engine. It had a payload of just half a ton for all its fuel, cameras and radios. And encryption systems can be heavy. (Big crypto boxes are a major reason the Army’s futuristic universal radio ended up being too bulky for combat, for example.) With the early Predator models, the Air Force made the conscious decision to leave off the crypto.

The flying branch was well aware of the risk. “Depending on the theater of operation and hostile electronic combat systems present, the threat to the UAVs could range from negligible with only a potential of signal intercept for detection purpose, to an active jamming effort made against an operating, unencrypted UAV,” the Air Force reported in 1996. ”The link characteristics of the baseline Predator system could be vulnerable to corruption of down links data or hostile data insertions.”

The Predator models steadily grew in power and payload, and took a big leap in dimensions and capability with the 36-foot-long Reaper version introduced in 2007. The Reaper has a 950-horsepower engine and a nearly 4,000-pound payload — more than enough capacity for crypto-enabled systems which, like all electronics, had shrunk in size and weight.

The problem was that, by then, the military had rushed to the battlefield hundreds of Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receivers, or Rovers – rugged, laptop-sized receivers with screens for watching drone footage. And those early version of the Rovers were developed and distributed so fast, the military once again left the crypto off. “It could be both intercepted (e.g., hacked into) and jammed,” e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program.

Which mean the Pentagon was stuck, for a time. The military couldn’t replace the old CDL waveform with something encryptable until the Rovers — and the radio transmitters aboard the Predators — could handle such a signal.

Eventually, the Rovers began to be swapped out for newer models. The latest version, the “Tactical Rover,” (.pdf) is about the size of an old-school mobile phone. It can use both the Advanced Encryption Standard an the triple-Data Encryption Standard to secure video feeds. There are now about a thousand of the units in the military’s hands.

And now, the Predators and Reapers are starting to get enhanced radios, too. “The fleet-wide upgrade begins later this year and carries on for several years,” says Maj. Mary Danner-Jones, an Air Force spokesperson. The service is spending $12 million on crypto-enabled Vortex transceivers (.pdf).

That’s allowing a new, hardened waveform to be introduced throughout the Predator and Reaper fleet. The Air Force recently gave Predator-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems a $26 million contract to retrofit its drone cockpits to accept the carrier signal, among other enhancements.(more at link)This isn’t the only vulnerability in the drone fleet. In March of 2011, an... more