Anonymous Breaches Another US Defense Contractor

JohnBert sends this excerpt from and IDG report: "The politically oriented hacking group Anonymous has released 1GB of what it says are private e-mails and documents from an executive of a U.S. defense company that sells unmanned aerial vehicles to police and the U.S. military. The documents were publicized in a post on Pastebin, with links leading to the actual material on another website. The material purportedly belongs to Richard Garcia, a senior vice president at Vanguard who was a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent for 25 years. Anonymous took special delight in the breach, as Garcia is director of InfraGard, an organization that liaises between private sector companies and the FBI. A group affiliated with Anonymous called LulzSecurity, or LulzSec, breached and defaced one of InfraGard's websites belonging to its Atlanta chapter in June."

Why?

[i kan reed]

One thing that I've increasingly lost track of is why people would put themselves in so much risk to attack these organizatoins. The pathos reminds me of suicide bombers, throwing their own lives away to attack a group they don't like. What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.

Re:Why?

[Opportunist]

Ya know, George Washington wasn't really starving either...

Re:Why?

[i kan reed]

Yes, that's absolutely true, but washington was an aristocrat, who already had power, authority, and wealth. The founding fathers parallel doesn't work well either, beause that had some underlying similarity to a coup. There was a power structure in the colonies that was fuctionally(by way of distance) independent of the government, and thus ripe for rebellion. I honestly don't think there's ever been a non-fictional organization with the same nature as anonymous.

Re:Why?

[Mr. Freeman]

It has nothing to do with luck. All the script kiddies in the world won't be able to get into a server unless it hasn't been patched in 5 years or the root password is "password".
Lulzsec, anonymous, etc. are all structured the same way. There's a huge group of extremely vocal script kiddies and a very small group of people who actually know what they're doing. The script kiddies are the ones running tools like LOIC to ddos websites and making statements to the press. This serves little purpose except to distract everyone from what the real hackers are doing. These are the ones that get arrested because even the most incompetent investigator can figure out who is sending a bajillion HTTP requests to a web server.

The people who actually know what they're doing don't get caught because, well, they know what they're doing. These people take the time to research their target, identify possible methods of attack, and then plan what they're going to do. They don't just attempt to break into random servers with whatever the vulnerability of the month happens to be and then somehow stumble across a metric shitload of confidential information.

Re:Why?

[cavreader]

"The USA also need to realize that they are now a tyranny, that they are comparable to Nazi Germany, and that this is necessarily going to piss people off and make them want to resist somehow. People have always resisted oppression, and this is no different." You are a fucking idiot. Your moral equivalency arguments denigrate and minimize the true horrors that existed during the Nazi era as well as the atrocities taking place across the world today. We have already reached the point where people honestly believe that Gaza and the West Bank mimic the conditions of Auschwitz death camps and ethnic cleansing is taking place. Ethnic cleansing is supposed to reduce the population of the target group but the Palestinians have increased their population 5 fold over the past 20 years. If ethnic cleansing is happening the perpetrators need a new washing machine. The US is called fascist and totalitarian which lets the truly totalitarian governments in the world off the hook for the atrocities they commit on a daily basis. Atrocities they do not even attempt to hide while telling anyone who complains to fuck off and mind their own business. The US has been and still is the country that the people living under true tyranny go to extremes to migrate to. Last time I checked there were no US military tanks rolling down main street threatening people with arrest and death because they want to openly state an opinion on the government. I have not seen any online bloggers or activists being arrested or prevented from publishing their opinions complain about the government.I have mot seen or heard of people being arrested in the middle of the night and made to disappear. Sadly you are not alone is creating this phenomenon of redefining history and using extreme moral equivalency, absurd conspiracy theories, and total ignorance of what the word tyranny actually means to support your short sighted and often ridicules opinions of society. The reason there is not an armed uprising in the US is because the media and people like yourself judge the entire country on the small minority of extremists on all sides of the political spectrum Any success that ANON and similar groups have achieved is not because of any technical genius on their part it is because of sloppy system admin on the sites being attacked. ANON has only exploited known vulnerabilities that have been patched for over a year. If they were really smart they would realize that hunting them down is child's play for groups like the NSA no matter how many proxies or data encryption keys they hide behind. So far they have just not been worth the effort. If the US was a tyranny these guys would already be either in jail or dead. Investigate what happens to people caught creating online vandalism or complaining about their government in countries like Iran, Syria, and N. Korea.