Tag Archives: hacktivists

Anonymous Attack Chicago Police And Indian Government Websites

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Various divisions of the hacktivist group Anonymous have been out in force over the last few days, taking down the website of the Chicago Police Department, as well as carrying out a series of attacks against websites for Indian government departments.

The motive behind the Chicago attack seemed to be empathy for street activists protesting against NATO‘s policies, with a YouTube video from “AntiS3curityOPS” posted on Saturday containing the following message:

“We are actively engaged in actions against the Chicago Police Department, and encourage anyone to take up the cause and use the AntiS3curityOPS Anonymous banner. For those able, chicagopolice.org should be fired upon as much as possible. We are in your harbor Chicago, and you will not forget us.”

As I write this, the website http://www.cityofchicago.org/police is still inaccessible.

Meanwhile an altogether different war was being waged in the subcontinent, as attacks on Indian government sites and an Indian anti-piracy firm were carried out in retaliation against blocks imposed on file sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay.

14 different government and political sites were attacked, with the Indian telecoms department, electronics and IT ministry, supreme court and sites used by the BJP and INC political parties among those hit hardest.

However while it may have been a broader attack in India, it doesn’t appear to have been as effective as the one carried out in Chicago. The DDoS strikes only had partial success, with most of the target sites soon recovering and only being offline intermittently.

Two Norwegian Teens Arrested After SOCA DDoS Attack

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Last week we reported that the website of the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) was brought down by hackers who staged a DDoS attack. Now it has emerged that two teenagers in Norway have been arrested for a series of computer attacks with SOCA believed to have been one of their targets.

There may be further arrests or at the very least more people brought in for questioning, with Norwegian prosecutor Erik Moestue quoted as saying: “We have arrested the two we think were most important in these attacks, but we still want to talk to more people.”

He added: “We know SOCA was recently attacked, as well as Norwegian and American sites, and that is one of the things that we are looking into.”

A spokesperson for Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service said that the sites in Norway and America had also been hit by a DDoS attack. The two suspects, aged 18 and 19, were charged at the end of last week after a period of sustained electronic attacks going on for several weeks.

Mr Moestue said the case was still under investigation and that it was too early to discuss the motive for the attacks. However, if the pair are found guilty then the maximum sentence for the offences they are being charged with is a six-year jail term.

A Norwegian press agency reported that the country’s largest financial services group DNB has been attacked, along with the Police Security Service, but NCIS would not confirm this.

Hacktivists Bring Down Soca Website With DDoS Attack

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The Serious Organised Crime Agency’s website was taken offline on Wednesday following a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Soca recently took down 36 sites involved in selling large quantities of stolen credit card data, but a spokesman for the UK agency would not confirm whether or not it knew who was behind the attack or why it took place.

The spokesman was quick to downplay the incident and point out that no confidential information was ever in danger of being stolen or made public, saying:

“DDoS attacks are a temporary inconvenience to website visitors but do not pose a security risk… Soca’s website contains only publicly available information and does not provide access to operational material.” He went on to add that when the site was taken offline on Wednesday evening, Soca “took action to limit the impact on other clients hosted by the [same] service provider.”

This not the first time that the Soca’s website has been targeted. In June 2011 members of the hacktivist group LulzSec forced the site to be taken offline using similar techniques. But why haven’t sites wised up to DDoS attacks?

Rik Ferguson, a security expert from Trend Micro, said that while it is possible for many sites to protect themselves from DDoS attacks, the cost cannot always be justified. His analogy may seem a little silly, but it does make a good point:

“The sensible person doesn’t walk around in a beekeeper’s outfit to keep the wasps away from their ice cream in summer. The sensible person accepts that wasps are attracted to ice cream and that wasps will always outnumber ice creams.”

In recent years we are seeing an increasing number of attacks aimed at bringing down websites. But I suppose the question is when will this end? Even though hackers are being arrested, as their skills increase it can become harder to track those still operational. Do you think that the authorities will ever purge the web of hacktivists?