Anonymous Claims Possession of Stuxnet Worm 234
An anonymous reader writes "Last night, a member of hacker group Anonymous announced on Twitter that the group was in possession of the Stuxnet worm. Recently, Anonymous has been in the news for its high profile attacks on software security firm HBGary, after Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary's sister firm HBGary Federal, claimed to have acquired the names of senior Anonymous members and threatened to release them to the public. This is where the possibility for Anonymous getting its hands on Stuxnet increases."
So? I have a copy of Code Red (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, so? I have a copy of the Code Red and Nimda somewhere in my office. Am I dangerous? No. Because they are known viruses and the holes the exploits used have been patched shut now.
Same Anonymous? (Score:2, Insightful)
This can't be the same Anonymous (off-shoot of 4chan) that thinks writing an aggressive Windows GUI ping program is "hacking"
Some proper organised crime group has usurped the name, surely.
"Hey, we announce ourselves as Anonymous, then all these script kiddies, who just DOS websites and leave blazingly obvious trails for authorities to follow, get sent down for our criminal deeds"
Anonymous is getting out of hand.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Anonymous is no longer related to any chans, it has become something on its own full with scriptkids wanting to belong to something bigger. Anonymous can officially be clasified as a terrorist group in my book with threats and attacks all over the world to defend their points of view.
It has totally lost the anarchistic feel it had and has become a group consisting of a handful of 'smart' guys giving out orders to the masses of zombie idiots who give up their connection voluntarily.
I hope everyone realizes that eventhough it recruits on sites like 4chan this version of anonymous is now out of their hands and became a radical splinter cell of the original anonymous.
Re:Anonymous is getting out of hand.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets look at the situation properly:
Anonymous is a group composed of [Members N], lead by [Leader L] of [belief X], who attempt to attack [Company Y] over [Reason Z].
Now, we know nothing about L or N. We don't know who took part in DDOSing mastercard (or who lead it), we don't know who hacked into the site (or who lead it), nor do we know their link to whoever DDOSed scientology, google bombed scientology, or protested in the streets. We don't know anything.
So assuming that N and L are variable. X changes with L.
So Anonymous isn't really a group. Its not a 'group of people which are now becoming a terrorist group'. Its an ever-changing grouping of different people by a different leader who chooses their target and their method. Do they have a master plan? Not really.
So viewing how anon changes is rather useless, since pretty much everything changes all the time.
This is the equivalent of looking at the human race at a whole and claiming that "The human race attacked Iraq, after attacking Poland in 1942, and Troy at some point in history" and trying to draw a conclusion.
There is no anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are talking about the Anonymous from 4chan, then there isn't any group like that. That implies to much organisation, a hierachy, an organization.
The idea originally was related but NOT the same to "I am Spartacus". And many people don't even understand that statement.
The "I am Spartacus" statement is this: "I hereby declare that I am the person you are seeking and accept all responsibility for my actions." If you state this, you BECOME Spartacus, you are it and LOOSE yourself with it. You can't say, "I smallfurrycreature represent Spartacus", you surrender yourself to the cause and become it. In the movie, the people all nailed up, are ALL Spartacus and by doing so the idea of Spartacus if not the person becomes invincible. No matter how many Spartacusses you nail to a cross, there is always one more just around the corner. It is the undying hero, the person dies but the idea goes on.
This doesn't sit well with our individual culture.
Anonymous takes this even further, if people understood it. You cannot state "I am Anonymous" for this is silly. The moment you tie yourself to this concept, you are no longer anonymous. You can speak with a thousand voices, you can at best be one voice representing a thousand but never a thousand. You cannot be anonymous only be a non-significant part of it.
The real idea behind it all on 4chan was to give a name to the movements/actions that were observed. It is like watching the migration patterns of animals and calling them Bob. Just because it now sounds like a person doesn't mean that a wildebeast migrating represents Bob or is controlled by the motives of Bob.
Does any of this rant matter
Yes. The Muslim brotherhood, are they the protesters in Egypt? Some western "news" stations would have you believe this. BUT this has NOT been an Islamic revolution. It might or might not become one but the protests where NOT guiden or orchastrated by them... some PROTESTERS might have been but not the "protest". It can be hard to grasp the difference. It is the difference between the resentment of the masses and individual grievances. Same as the protests in Tunesia were not about a closed vegetable stand or in Egypt about the beating of a youth or in France about cake or in the USA about tea.
Anonymous is not a group that exists on 4chan in /b/. If anything it is the behavior of individual but unknown people who use the web to do something in a minimally organised way to have a far reaching effect. It is the mob effect on the internet.
That means that there is no point in ousting its leaders. You can get the leaders of one mob and might even be cheered for that by the mob next to it. Anonymous cheers cat killers and hunts them down. It is not a singleton, it is a class. You can spawn things from it but almost by its nature, the moment you do that is ceases to be the idea and it becomes Anonymous XYZ the group.
Anonymous doesn't have its hands on anything and has its hands on everything because we can all be Anonymous and we all aren't.
But media doesn't grasp that since they need to put a face to the name. But ultimately this means that Anonymous will just get more legenday. Strike one group down and another will take its place. Just as killing a few hundreds protestors, and arresting/torturing far more, did NOTHING to stop the protest in Egypt. Or killing all the buffalo stopped Bob.
Re:Senior anons? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Anonymous" is not simply a group that uses anonymity.
Anonymous is an un-group. It is the collection, at any single moment in time, of people attempting to achieve a common goal loosely organized via anonymous internet communications. The anonymous people working on a common goal, can change from day to day or moment to moment. The goal(s) being worked on can change from day to day and moment to moment. A call for action is thrown out in various anonymous Internet places, and some people who frequent those places decide the goal sounds worthwhile to them for various reasons, different for each person. Others decide the goal is not worthwhile and ignores it or calls out the original poster for having selfish reasons for the call to action ("We're not your personal army").
To say there are "members" and a "hierarchy" or even an actual group called "Anonymous" in any normal sense of the word reveals a lack of understanding of the phenomena.
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, so they have a copy of something that was designed to replicate itself and is known to have spread to literally hundreds of thousands of unsecured machines? And they have a binary copy of it? I'm going to write the rest of this post from my bomb shelter.
The media talk about Anonymous like it's some shadowy terrorist super-villain collective, but that's really missing the point. Anonymous is, at its core, the world's most prolific troll. Look at the sites they attacked in the whole WikiLeaks affair. Visa.com and MasterCard.com? It's obvious to anyone with a clue that these are symbolic targets. If they'd had the desire (and arguably the capability) to inflict real damage, they'd have gone after the payment processing infrastructure instead. But their goal isn't to break stuff. It's to do something relatively inconsequential, and see how many media organizations they can get to shit their pants over it.
This is (roughly) the same group whose crowning achievement was getting Oprah to say "over 9000 penises" on national TV. Even if they have the capability to inflict real damage—and some members clearly do—they seem to be more interested in getting attention and playing the media for complete fools. Which is way more entertaining than indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the world.
And that's the bottom line. Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
Re:Senior anons? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's probably easier to introduce Anonymous as a culture. Saying "Anonymous DDoS'd a website and the FBI is now trying to identify them" is like saying "Punks spray-painted a wall and now the FBi is trying to identify all punks" (you can replace 'Punks' by 'Rappers', 'Goths', 'Bikers' and whatever else).
Once you think of Anonymous that way, you can then try to understand what they really are. Comparing them to an organization or an open, drop-in/drop-out group is much less accurate.
There's lots of 'Anonymous' people who did not take part in any DDoS attacks. Lots of those involved in Project Chanology did not take part in Operation: Payback and many involved in Chanology probably did. Some people call themselves 'Anonymous' because they share the same views or ideals, the same mindset...
Culture is definitely the best way to define Anonymous. Some (many?) adherents of this culture just happen to take part in those DDoS attacks because it fits in with the ideology of their culture. Just like eco-terrorists all happen to have strong environmental beliefs, and yet that doesn't mean that ecologists are all closely tied to eco-terrorism activities.