Anonymous Supporters Tricked Into Installing Trojan 184
dsinc sends this quote from a Symantec report:
"In 2011, dozens of Anonymous members who participated in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in support of Anonymous hacktivism causes were arrested. In these DDoS attacks, supporters using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon denial-of-service (DoS) tool would voluntarily include their computer in a botnet for attacks in support of Anonymous. In the wake Anonymous member arrests this week, it is worth highlighting how Anonymous supporters have been deceived into installing Zeus botnet clients purportedly for the purpose of DoS attacks. The Zeus client does perform DoS attacks, but it doesn’t stop there. It also steals the users' online banking credentials, webmail credentials, and cookies. The deception of Anonymous supporters began on January 20, 2012, the day of the FBI Megaupload raid."
HOW? (Score:2, Informative)
And you get what you deserve. (Score:2, Informative)
I have about as much sympathy for the people victimized by this scheme as I do for people that sign up for 419 scams where the come-on letter is clearly asking the recipient to engage in money laundering, theft, and blatant violations of tax and banking laws.
If you install malicious software on your computer on purpose, I have ZERO sympathy for you when it turns out the software includes you in the list of victims.
Re:Reminds me of prohibition (Score:4, Informative)
The difference being that adding a scent to natural gas saves lives, but adding poison to industrial alcohol definitely kills people. At least tens of thousands of people died from alcohol the government intentionally poisoned during prohibition. The government's position, of course, was that it was entirely the fault of the bootleggers who distilled that alcohol for human consumption and of the people who drank it. The reality is that it was a terror campaign run by the US government and the fact that those who died were breaking the law doesn't in any way excuse it.
Re:what could go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
If you know enough to use a sandbox, you shouldn't be using LOIC to DoS a webserver anyway, since it's not effective. Something that works at the HTTP level (like Slowloris [wikipedia.org] for Apache servers) will be way more effective.
Re:Reminds me of prohibition (Score:5, Informative)
No it was poisonous, industrial alcohol has always needed to be poisoned to be legal they just changed the ingredients of this poison to stop people getting around it.
Your statement is self-contradictory. You claim that the industrial ethanol was somehow magically poisonous despite the fact that, as you admit, it was only poisonous in order to kill people who tried to drink it. Now, some industrial alcohol did need more distillation to be safer for consumption while other industrial alcohol conversely was contaminated with benzene (although in pretty much safe trace amounts) from the extreme distillation process it had been through (to remove all the water). None of it was toxic on anything like the levels it became toxic after the poisoning program. Also, that "always needed to be poisoned" scenario you mention isn't really true. That program started during prohibition.
You said that "they did not add poison to kill people, they added it to make it not drinkable". The reason that it wasn't drinkable after the poison was added was because it killed people. The poison was a terror weapon designed to terrify people away from bootlegged alcohol for fear that they would die. To accomplish this goal, the poisoners were deliberately killing people.
I believe you that at no point were they trying to _secretly_ poison prohibition criminals. It wasn't much of a secret, they were reasonably up front about it. They did keep the information on the constantly changing mixture of poisons they were using secret so as to present a moving target to the chemists working for the bootleggers, however. The obvious consequence of this is that the bootleggers would be selling safe alcohol made from industrial alcohol one day and the next batch would be poisonous. You can claim that the poisoners were just naive innocents. I think that's unlikely, but even if it's true, it still makes them guilty of manslaughter.