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.'"
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
Victims? They don't get tricked into installing a botnet client. They install, configure and run a DDoS tool, voluntarily. Although botnet herders might participate sometimes, I don't think any infected computers count as Anonymous members...
No-no on marriage from old Euro power politics (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I get a lot of history across my plate sideways as it were, since my wife is a history and English teacher. It's kinda fun actually -- she's already mostly vetted the books by the time they make it to the house, so I don't have to slog through lots of BS to find the good reads. :)
On-topic here, the reason the Church (big-C Catholic Church) explicitly outlawed the clergy marrying was because of clergy folks setting themselves up as little hereditary fiefdoms, complete with lines of succession and all the fun politicking and internecine warfare that usually accompanies such an arrangement. Disallowing marriage meant breaking that line of power, and is not too dissimilar from policies at the State Department that forcibly rotate diplomats -- this prevents anyone from getting too cozy (at least in theory).
In more detail, celibacy was general Church policy possibly as far back as AD 300 and is certainly mentioned in the mid-400s. This policy was often overlooked though in the hurly burly of northern European politics, and it wasn't explicitly decreed against until the mid-1000s with the Gregorian reforms. Suffice it to say that it's complicated, but the crux of the issue was inheritance and power struggles related to it.
There's plenty more online via Google [google.com], or starting from this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].
Cheers,
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd be surprised. And I'm saying that as a loyal Catholic.
As a loyal Catholic, I believe the Holy Spirit guides the Church, otherwise I wouldn't bet on it lasting 2000 days leave alone 2000 years. Although I support Pope Benedict and think he's done a lot of good, I believe the Church survives despite its leadership, not because of it... at least these days. And like all Catholics who have not turned away from the Church, there's a reason I remain loyal to Church despite all the nonsense and corruption that goes on, because it's a loyalty to Someone much more important than the people running it.
Having said that though, not giving Anonymous the satisfaction is absolutely the best thing to do.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Actually, according the Pew Foundation, which actually studies things like this, churches are statistically safer than public schools and sports programs. The difference is that by law, you cannot sue the government run schools and entities when this occurs, so you don't hear about it.
There is a significant amount of data available now, particularly because of the Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and it shows that the movement of pedophiles was not as wide spread through the US church as people think. It most definitely occurred in certain dioceses, but not everywhere.
I think your information about the Bush administration passing laws to prevent lawsuits on behalf of the church is also wrong. Those cases occurred in civil courts under state jurisdiction. Federal law didn't come into play. As a matter of fact, many states extended the statute of limitations on the cases, but only for those abused in a church setting, not a public school or any other setting.
The Pew Foundation studies also show that most of the abuse in the US was from men ordained to the priesthood in the sixties and early seventies. As such, most of them are no longer active in ministry, even if they were never caught do to age restrictions.
Just thought slashdot readers should have some accurate and verifiable information.