Vatican Attack Provides Insight Into Anonymous 355
Hugh Pickens writes "John Markoff writes that an unsuccessful campaign against the Vatican by Anonymous, which did not receive wide attention at the time, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance, and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective and may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack. The attack, called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites, was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico and was designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests. First the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own website and social sites like Twitter and Flickr calling on volunteers to download free attack software and imploring them to 'stop child abuse' by joining the cause. It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, then a core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church's World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside. In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps so the hackers turned to a brute-force approach of a distributed denial-of-service, On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day but did not crash the site. 'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,' says Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. 'You have four or five guys who really know what they're doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.'"
Sounds just like... (Score:5, Insightful)
The organization they were attacking.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue as well a number of people deriding the "a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots" idea.
A protest is a protest. You're not an "idiot" just because you're not an organizer.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they are trying to debunk the idea that Anonymous is a legion of hackers. Instead Anonymous is a handful of hackers surrounded by a bunch of people with computers.
Re:Anonymous (Score:0, Insightful)
You're an idiot
Geniuses? (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling the core trolls geniuses is an overstatement. Most of them are just scriptkiddies whose most sophisticated attacks are correctly guessing when the password is 12345. The strategy of Anonymous is to try hacking against easy targets and DDoS against well-secured ones. And while DDoS is relatively easy to implement, the LOIC those "geniuses" came up with is a crappy tool.
Mostly idiots? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,"
You can probably say this about most organizations in the world.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Attacking the Catholic Church in 2012 over the priest abuse scandal is like attacking Britain over John Major's policies.
The abuse scandal was a pattern of abuse and cover-up that exploded into the media spotlight in the late 80s/early 90s. The Church did wrong, but since then, they've done a lot of right - there's a zero-tolerance policies, lots of priests have been defrocked, billions in settlements have been paid, hundreds were jailed, etc. There will always be sexual abuse in any large organization with access to children - schools, Boy/Girl scouts, the YMCA, the Mendocino Physics Club, Gencon, whatever. So yes, there may be some that goes on today on a small scale...but what has changed is the organizational response. In 1970, a Bishop might have shuffled a pedophile priest to a different parish. Today, there's zero tolerance, formal processes, and a much greater awareness.
So...why attack in 2012? What is the point? If this was 1990, it'd be more understandable.
I think "anonymous" (aka a half-dozen bored kids) is just desperate to remain in the spotlight. The attention-getting is more important than any "cause". In fact, attention-getting is the cause.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's age-related you can get glasses for ten bucks. Or a CrystaLens implant for $15,000.
back on topic... from TFS -- designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests.
As if everybody and his dog didn't already know about the pedophlia. I never could understand the Catholic's refusal to let priests marry, considering that one of the Apostles (Peter maybe? I'd have to look it up) said that men should marry to avoid being tempted into sinful sex, and there's surely not much that's more sinful than raping children.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe I heard that churches are statisically safer than schools or sports programs
No, churches are no less safe. It's just statistically more likely that they'll consider themselves above the law, and shuffle the pedophile priest over to the next parish, shred the memo, and move on.
The current pope was the man put in charge of shuffling the pedophiles around and keeping it out of the press. It is highly unlikely that things have grown safer for children under his watch. After all, if it had, why did the church need to get the republicans under Bush to pass a law disallowing lawsuits and legal actions? Because what we know is only the tip of the iceberg, and the idea that the pedophile priests have all been caught, or all magically stopped doing what gets them off, is laughable.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
I never could understand the Catholic's refusal to let priests marry, considering that one of the Apostles (Peter maybe? I'd have to look it up) said that men should marry to avoid being tempted into sinful sex, and there's surely not much that's more sinful than raping children.
Pedophile priests are not raping children because they can't marry. They're raping children because they are sick men who should never have been allowed to wear a collar in the first place.
Re:Anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
but wasn't Paul (or one of the anonymous authors writing under the Paul psuedonym) responsible for the decree that priests of the Catholic Church be celibate in order to focus their energies on God?
In the context of the rest of the epistle (i.e. letter), the advice is being given to missionaries, basically. I.e. when you are out travelling and spreading the word, don't also be running around trying to hook up with the locals -- it kind of messes with the message you are trying to teach. Do that before or after, not during.
It's generally thought that Paul himself was a widower when he left on his travels, as marriage was a prerequisite for his pre-conversion status as a Pharisee.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like little more than a language exercise. If you're volunteering yourself to be unobscured fodder, I guess you might be both a volunteer and a victim.
Same could be said of belonging to the Catholic church then.
Re:Anonymous (Score:2, Insightful)
With the tiny difference that that doesn't involve attacking people.
Vigilantes are cool, sexy, nearly always total morons, and they hurt people. They do what they do specifically to hurt people who they think deserve it. It baffles me how people can on one hand "hate" the us (or whatever, I'm sure there's an oil company in there somewhere) for not always doing 100% due process properly (and screwing up at times) ... and support things like anonymous.
I now declare this thread 100% off-topic.
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
The Church has always lived within the rush of humanity. That it is affiliated with child rape says much more about western culture than it does about the church, if one looks at teachers, coaches, youth leaders and of course priests you will see that they all fall percentage wise into similar numbers of child predators.
In other words it's a lot like saying Democrats are criminals, because more blacks vote Democrat, and blacks have the highest incarceration rate. There's a HELL of a lot of "ism", assumption and ignorance in that statement - similar to your own comments.
Re:Anonymous (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets start off with a real world correction, "Anonymous" has a whole history of legal public protest prior https://whyweprotest.net/anonymous-scientology/ [whyweprotest.net] , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology [wikipedia.org] prior to any yarns about 4chan, global conspiracies, organised crime RICO distortions, handful of geniuses and legion of idiots or any other ludicrous mass media distortions.
Where it has gone since those days has never been challenged by those that worked to initiate the idea, as it is and always will be the individuals own choice and responsibility for what they choose to do in the name of "Anonymous",up to and including false flag events, (stupid enough to do it to yourself why would anyone protest).
Just another lame arsed "please buy my book" sensationalist. Whether it's a dead tree work by a short run minor publisher and a desperate author or a web site eventually you just start to ignore them as pointless.
The only thing that should ever be challenged is, government investigative agents seeking to gain promotion by destroying the lives of unskilled teenagers with claims of terrorism and threats to vital infrastructure with the hoodoo of "Anonymous". When government agencies started testing recruits with lie detectors completely forgetting psychopaths are born capable of passing any lie detector test, what other result could be expected.
Lazy sensationalist journalism of course does it's bit to promote readership over the truth and the harm it's lies of omission and distortion will cause it's victims.
Re:Anonymous (Score:3, Insightful)