The first global cyber war has begun

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The first global cyber war has begun

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 11, 2010 6:01 pm

this is not about wikileaks, much bigger
WikiLeaks backlash:The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackersAs Julian Assange is held in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison, the anonymous community of hacktivists takes to the cyber battlefields


Share28 Comments (18) Mark Townsend, Paul Harris in New York, Alex Duval Smith in Johannesburg, Dan Sabbagh, Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 December 2010 21.30 GMT Article history
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.

He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.

"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".

Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.

Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.

Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.

The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun.


London

At 9.15am last Tuesday a thin, white-haired figure left the Frontline Club, the west London establishment dedicated to preserving freedom of speech, and voluntarily surrendered to police. After two weeks of newspaper revelations concerning countries from Korea to Nigeria, and figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Prince Andrew, a warrant for Assange's arrest had just been received by British police. It was from Swedish prosecutors eager to question him on unrelated allegations of rape.

The response to WikiLeaks' cable release had been savage, particularly in the US. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said those who passed the secrets to Assange should be executed. Sarah Palin demanded Assange be hunted in the same way an al-Qaida operative would be pursued. The US attorney general Eric Holder ordered his officials to begin a criminal investigation into Assange with the intention of putting him on trial in the US. News of his arrest, even on unrelated charges, pleased the US authorities. "That sounds like good news to me," said Robert Gates, US secretary of defence.

Yet even as Assange prepared to appear in a London court last week, an unlikely alliance of defenders had begun plotting to turn on the forces circling WikiLeaks. They were beginning to attack Amazon, which had been persuaded to sever links with WikiLeaks by Joe Lieberman, who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee; they also hit every domain name system (DNS) that broke WikiLeaks.org's domain name: Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, which stopped facilitating donations to the site, and the Swiss post office which froze WikiLeaks' bank account.

Operation Payback was hitting back alongside a fledgling offshoot, Operation Avenge Assange, both operating under the Anonymous umbrella. These are a loose alliance of hackers united by a near-obsessive desire for information libertarianism who congregate on the website 4Chan.org.

The cyberwar did not only involve obvious symbols of authority, though. For days, from their darkened chatrooms, the Anonymous ones had been watching a hacker called the Jester who seemed to be co-ordinating a series of attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks. They had noticed the Jester's pro-censorship credentials, deducing he must be receiving help. Speculation mounted that the Jester was a shadowy conduit working at the behest of the US authorities. "We wondered who was really behind his anti-WikiLeaks agenda," said a source.

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority.

In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended. As Assange was remanded in custody and taken to Wandsworth jail, Anonymous vowed to "punish" the institutions that had axed links with the website under pressure from the US authorities. The websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal were brought down; so too the Swedish government's.

One Anonymous hacker said: "I've rambled on and on about the 'oncoming internet war' for years. I'm not saying I know how to win. But I am saying the war is on."


Stockholm

Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated. A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".

That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.

Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.

In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.

In Sweden, among the country's community of hackers and left-leaning political activists, the timing is viewed as coincidental rather than conspiratorial.

"The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously,'' said Åsa Linderborg, culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid. Film-maker Bosse Lindquist, whose WikiLeaks investigation will be broadcast on Swedish TV tonight, and who has spent many hours with Assange over the past few months, said Assange's attitude to women did not seem in any way striking.

"If you look at the two prosecutors involved in investigating the rape allegations, they are not types you would imagine bowing to any kind of pressure from, say, the Swedish government or the United States.''

A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, also dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''

Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.

"Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats,'' Linderborg said.

Of course, given the nature of the web, the allegations have triggered a series of attacks on both women's characters with lurid claims of "women who cry rape" and "bitches trying to send an innocent man to prison".


Operation Payback

Those monitoring the chatrooms used by Operation Payback say its hackers have set aside the sexual allegations, instead concentrating their efforts on amassing greater potency for the next phase of the WikLeaks fightback. The weapons deployed last week were "denial of service" attacks in which online computers are harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

The initial attacks against the Swiss PostFinance required about 200 computers, according to one Anonymous source. Yet within a day hackers were able to recruit thousands more pro-WikiLeaks footsoldiers. By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted last Wednesday, close to 3,000 computers were involved.

Anonymous leaders began distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Payback. So far more than 9,000 users in the US have downloaded the software; in second place is the UK with 3,000. Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Russia and Australia follow with more than 1,000. The 11th country embroiled in the attacks is Sweden, where WikiLeaks's massive underground servers are housed, with 75 downloads.

Sean-Paul Correll, a cyber threat analyst at Panda Security, who has monitored Operation Payback since its conception, said it was impossible to "profile" those involved. "They are anonymous and they are everywhere," he said. "They have day jobs. They are adults and kids. It is just a bunch of people." Middle-class professional members working alongside self-styled anarchists.

Ostensibly, Anonymous is a 24-hour democracy run by whoever happens to be logged on; leaders emerge and disappear depending on the target that is being attacked and the whims of members. Correll said: "This group does not exist with some sort of hierarchy. It exists with a few organisers but these can change at any time. That gives the group great power in that it is impossible to trace and define. At the same time it is also a source of weakness as its actions can be unfocused."

Ideas are floated on internet bulletin boards, whose location moves daily to evade detection. Ultimately a proposal hits a democratic "tipping point" and action is taken.

A major test of Payback's mounting firepower will be Amazon, given the size of its servers. The attempt to attack the site last Thursday was half-hearted, but nevertheless audacious. Now sources estimate they would need between 30,000 and 40,000 computers to hurt Amazon and there is a growing feeling among hacktivists that it could happen. If it does, the retailer could lose millions of dollars during the Christmas season.

So far, though, most of the attacks have been principally designed to register protest rather than destabilise companies financially, opting for their public websites rather than their underlying infrastructure.

Two of the internet's most important social networking sites – Twitter and Facebook – are also becoming targets of elements within Anonymous.

Twitter upset hackers last week by removing the Anonymous account – which had 22,000 followers – amid speculation that it was preventing the term #wikileaks appearing on its trending topics. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed for violating its conditions, a move that has similarly annoyed a cohort of hackers. Both Facebook and Twitter have won praise in recent years as outlets for free speech, yet both also harbour corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as advertising platforms for other companies.

Their use by Anonymous to direct people planning attacks has, according to many analysts, placed both in a difficult position. Facebook, which still has sites eulogising murderer Raoul Moat and Holocaust deniers, said it drew the line on groups that attack others, a bold move considering the site's WikiLeaks page boasts more than 1.3 million supporters. Any evidence that both sites yielded to US pressure and the gloves would be off. So too for any organisation that yields to American demands over WikiLeaks.

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a book which argues the internet has failed to democraticise the world successfully, believes the attacks are already viewed by Washington "as striking at the very heart of the global economy".

Another emerging target in the weeks ahead is the US government itself. For a brief time last Tuesday, senate.gov – the website of every US senator – went down. Cyberguerillas claim it is a possible sign of things to come.


The future

The trajectory of the WikiLeaks controversy is almost impossible to predict. On Tuesday Assange will attend his next bail hearing. Although supporters have stumped up £180,000, it is expected bail will be refused, pending a full hearing of Sweden's extradition request. However his lawyer may also reveal fresh claims of US interference in the saga.

Regardless of the fate of its founder, WikiLeaks will continue releasing declassified cables. At the moment only several hundred of 250,000 cables have been publicised.

Analysts now describe the organisation's structure as a "networked enterprise", a phrase that has been used in the past in relation to al-Qaida.

For all the US attempts, it is clear the attacks on WikiLeaks have made minimal impact and are unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked.

Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman has indicated that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may be investigated for breaking US espionage laws. At present, who will win the "world's first information war" remains unclear.

Morozov said: "There will be many more people from the CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] hanging out around them."

But the conflict increasingly seems likely to target the real profits of US corporations. Today a 24-year-old from London will ready his weapons for the battle ahead
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby wintler2 » Sun Dec 12, 2010 6:48 am

CIA’s honeypot Wikileaks mirror readily reveals it was set up by CIA

By Dan La Ponsie, 11 December, 2010, 1 Comment

Below is the full content of Xeni Jardin’s original post at Boing Boing, which has since mysteriously vanished (and is still gone as of this writing). That disappearing post only adds to the intrigue, does it not?

There’s also a copy of the Boing Boing posting in Google’s webcache.

For more on this — including critical analysis — I recommend checking out the Reddit conversation, and also a great conversation at Above Top Secret. Techdirt also has an article about this. As Xeni Jardin said in her posting, how many Wikileak mirrors have been setup by the CIA (with better cloaking)?

Here’s the original posting from Boing Boing:
CIA’s honeypot Wikileaks mirror readily reveals it was set up by CIA

Xeni Jardin at 5:15 PM Friday, Dec 10, 2010

Screen-shot-2010-12-10-at-5.20.jpg

Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking? Here’s a related Reddit thread. (via Len Sassaman)
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby 82_28 » Sun Dec 12, 2010 7:12 am

Goddamn, Boingboing is turning into RI. I knew Xeni could do it. You always felt she had it in her even with BB's publicly made known aversion to conspiracy theories.

We're fucked. Stand up for what we have. But we are fucked. This is going to be so difficult to unravel. This could very well be a scorched Earth attack on everything we know about this shit. Shit is flying fast and furious. Very fascinating, very scary. But it's on.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby yossarian » Sun Dec 12, 2010 8:02 am

wintler2 wrote:
CIA’s honeypot Wikileaks mirror readily reveals it was set up by CIA

By Dan La Ponsie, 11 December, 2010, 1 Comment

Below is the full content of Xeni Jardin’s original post at Boing Boing, which has since mysteriously vanished (and is still gone as of this writing). That disappearing post only adds to the intrigue, does it not?

There’s also a copy of the Boing Boing posting in Google’s webcache.

For more on this — including critical analysis — I recommend checking out the Reddit conversation, and also a great conversation at Above Top Secret. Techdirt also has an article about this. As Xeni Jardin said in her posting, how many Wikileak mirrors have been setup by the CIA (with better cloaking)?

Here’s the original posting from Boing Boing:
CIA’s honeypot Wikileaks mirror readily reveals it was set up by CIA

Xeni Jardin at 5:15 PM Friday, Dec 10, 2010

Screen-shot-2010-12-10-at-5.20.jpg

Looks like the CIA created a “honeypot” wikileaks mirror at wikileaks.psytek.net, presumably to see who is downloading the leaks—but they screwed up the anonymization. A quick Google reveals who’s behind psytek.net. Wonder what other mirrors they set up, but with better cloaking? Here’s a related Reddit thread. (via Len Sassaman)


Musing on Misinformation & Morons
Saturday, December 11, 2010

The net is abuzz with a rumor claiming that the CIA is behind a Wikileaks mirror that was hosted at http://wikileaks.psytek.net. This rumor lacked any real evidence, yet was reported by many in the hacker/hacktivist community as fact.

The rumor was started by a comment on Reddit.com. On Thursday, December 9th 2010 at 08:28 PM PST Reddit user isoteemu commented:

"I was going thru WikiLeaks mirrors list, and noticed a small oddity; http://wikileaks.psytek.net was on netblock which belonged Central Intelligence Agency. It has now changed, but 010-12-08 12:27:34 (EEST) was still registered for CIA."

Most users replied with more baseless speculation, while the few users asking for real evidence were drowned out by a beautiful circle-jerk of ignorance.

.....

Where is the CIA connection? The user never posted any conclusive evidence (or any real evidence whatsoever).

On Thursday, December 9th 2010 at 11:27 PM PST Reddit user theghostofme commented that a google search for psytek.net turned up http://www.cia.gov as the third result.

Of course, the hive mind pounced on this, extolling it as further evidence of CIA involvement. Unfortunately, this search ranking was actually the result of the SEO keyword poisoning that resulted from the Reddit thread in question.

.....

I don't believe that this was an intentional or malicious misinformation campaign. But I do believe that the poor judgment of Len Sassaman, Jacob Appelbaum, and the boingboing editorial team is responsible for this perversion of truth.

I know that some Wikileaks supporters may think that even if untrue, this misinformation is positive, as it makes the CIA look bad. I would argue that Wikileaks is a platform based on truth, not deception. Lets leave the lying to the government and focus on the real facts that are being disclosed in the cables.

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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby Plutonia » Sun Dec 12, 2010 3:45 pm

seemslikeadream wrote:this is not about wikileaks, much bigger
anonymous community of hacktivists takes to the cyber battlefields

Anonymous has been doing this sort of thing for a few years now. It's par for the course.

On Edit: Though there has been an Anonymous/Wikileaks intersection in the past with Project Chanology and WL's publication of the Co$'s top sekret documents. Here, here and here.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister

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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby wintler2 » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:11 pm

Oops re 'CIA mirroring WL's..' story, thanks Yossarian, hero of my youth.
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby elfismiles » Sun Dec 12, 2010 5:25 pm

82_28 wrote:Goddamn, Boingboing is turning into RI. I knew Xeni could do it. You always felt she had it in her even with BB's publicly made known aversion to conspiracy theories.

We're fucked. Stand up for what we have. But we are fucked. This is going to be so difficult to unravel. This could very well be a scorched Earth attack on everything we know about this shit. Shit is flying fast and furious. Very fascinating, very scary. But it's on.


Cool for BB to turn into an RI.

That reminds me of how I only recently realized I'd somehow missed more forest for the trees interactions tween Bruce Sterling and Katherine Albrecht:

The Futurist Muckrakers
by Bruce Sterling

Image
The following is the foreword to the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID" by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre

http://www.katherinealbrecht.com/index. ... &Itemid=46


elfismiles wrote:It’s Payback Time! The cyberwar begins by Justin Raimondo
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010 ... back-time/

...

WikiLeaks battle: a new amateur face of cyber war?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101209/tc_ ... re_amateur

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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby Plutonia » Tue Dec 14, 2010 2:37 am

Anonymous have shape-shifted into orderly practitioners of "Crowdjournalism" for their latest adventure - from their new squeaky clean website:

Image

Announcement

To improve the quality of the reports, we have chosen to introduce a concept of 'crowd-journalism' as a subform of crowdsourcing. Reports have to be posted, reviewed and if necessary corrected on the Quality Control System. This will lead to an enormous advantage over conventional journalism. The goal is to give everybody the possibility to get involved to bring success with the possibility of a totally independent reporting. More information concerning this simple but effective crowd-journalism system can be found here.


Quality Control

This project has been founded with the purpose of sorting through recent WikiLeaks releases and raising awareness of potentially important and previously overlooked information. In order to review your research for errors or amend the content the Wikileaks release contained, we have created a small utility which allows contributors to submit and discuss potential content for the website. This idea is generally based on crowd-sourcing.

We ask you to:

* take a closer look at the published files on WikiLeaks
* pursue unknown or suspicious content
* review the information you discover
* give feedback on the information to perfect them journalistically
* submit your findings for review, as outlined on this

Your report will be published on the main site after being checked and verified by this procedure.
How to submit your research for review

1. Step one: Go to the crowd-journalistic quality control subpage, by clicking the green button on the upper right or simply this link
2. Step two: Read the instructions there
3. Step three: Participate and enjoy


Wait-a-minute-what! How'd-they-do-that? LOL

Crowdjournalism? Hillary must be pulling her frikkin hair out.
[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister

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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby wintler2 » Tue Dec 14, 2010 7:51 am

Plutonia wrote:..
Image
..

Crowdjournalism? Hillary must be pulling her frikkin hair out.



This party just keeps getting bigger. :jumping:

Wandered over for a squiz, Leakspin is a little buggy at present, but theres folks there workin' away regardless. More non-native english speakers than on most parts of web i see, thats cool, makes me vocab useful like.
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby vanlose kid » Tue Dec 14, 2010 10:18 am

Julian Assange urges supporters to protect WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief asks the world to defend his site from attacks by 'instruments of US foreign policy'

Josh Halliday
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 December 2010 12.59 GMT

The crippling web attacks on multinational companies threaten to escalate after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange urged supporters to protect the whisteblowers' site from "instruments of US foreign policy".

Whitehall is preparing for an online backlash from the Anonymous cyber activists that brought down sites belonging to Visa, Mastercard and Paypal last week in response to the companies cutting ties with WikiLeaks. Downing Street said sites that deal with tax returns or benefits for millions of Britons are on red alert for a possible cyber attack.

Speaking though a written statement from his Wandsworth prison cell, Assange last night said he was "calling for the world to protect my work and my people" from renewed pressure to restrict the site from publishing more leaked documents.

A number of companies hosting WikiLeaks' online operations, including Amazon and Paypal, have terminated their relationship with the whistleblowers' site after pressure from Joe Lieberman, chair of the US homeland security committee.

Assange is today appearing at Westminster magistrates court to appeal against the decision to refuse him bail, pending extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault. He said last night that his convictions were "unfaltering" despite the extradition attempt, according to a written statement sent to Australian broadcaster the Seven Network by his mother, Christine Assange.

"We now know that Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and others are instruments of US foreign policy. It's not something we knew before," Assange said in a statement likely to add new impetus to the spate of cyber attacks being perpetrated by Anonymous in support of WikiLeaks.

In a separate development, an attack which exposed the email addresses and passwords of 1.3 million Gawker users was also today linked with the thousand-strong Anonymous group.

A subgroup of the amorphous "hacktivists" is preparing to hack and deface US government websites with pro-WikiLeaks propaganda, according to a Sky News journalist. Anonymous has previously made explicit its ambition to bring down the websites belonging to the US Senate and Swedish government.

The website of the Royal Bank of Scotland was today experiencing problems loading after leaked US diplomatic documents showed that the bank's new chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, had said its former directors had failed to live up to their duties. However, RBS said it was not coming under the attacks that have brought down other financial institutions' websites in recent days.

"We are aware of an issue affecting some online banking customers and we are working to resolve this as soon as possible," RBS said in a statement. "We apologise to affected customers for any inconvenience this has caused."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/201 ... ve-updates

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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby 82_28 » Tue Dec 14, 2010 10:23 am

Well, if conventional RI "wisdom" holds, wouldn't this war be exactly what all wars were ever? The profiteers and then the rest. . .
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby wintler2 » Tue Dec 14, 2010 5:38 pm

Guardian wrote:..In a separate development, an attack which exposed the email addresses and passwords of 1.3 million Gawker users was also today linked with the thousand-strong Anonymous group.


Interesting, interesting. How long before social media becomes a front too, and not just for snark&lulz.
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby justdrew » Tue Dec 14, 2010 5:46 pm

By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby elfismiles » Fri Dec 17, 2010 6:43 pm


UN mulls internet regulation options
By John Hilvert on Dec 17, 2010 9:51 AM (23 hours ago)

WikiLeaks sparks push for tighter controls.


The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

Establishment of such a group has the backing of several countries, spearheaded by Brazil.

At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet - specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.

The Brazilian delegate stressed, however, that this should not be seen as a call for an "takeover" of the internet.

India, South Africa, China and Saudi Arabia appeared to favour a new possible over-arching inter-government body.

However, Australia, US, UK, Belgium and Canada and attending business and community representatives argued there were risks in forming yet another working group that might isolate itself from the industry, community users and the general public.

"My concern is that if we were to make a move to form a governmental-only body then that would send a very strong signal to civil society that their valuable contribution was not required or was not being looked for," an un-named Australian representative told the meeting.

Debate on the creation of a new inter-governmental body stemmed from a UN Economic and Social Council resolution 2010/2 of 19 July.

The resolution invited the UN Secretary-General "to convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues."

Much debate concerned the meaning of "enhanced cooperation" and whether a new inter-governmental body was required. Participants also debated the roles of existing organisations - such as the Internet Governance Forum, ICANN and the ITU.

The IGF - an organisation that informs the UN but makes no decisions - is running close to the end of a five-year mandate, due to expire at ?the end of the year.

The likes of ISOC, ICANN and more recently the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) have recently expressed concerns [PDF]? that a working panel to decide on the future of the IGF has been limited to representatives from member-states.

"Australia is a very strong supporter of the Internet Governance Forum," the unidentified Australian UN representative said at the New York meeting this week. "That is very much due to the multi-stake-holder approach of the IGF. It is an inclusive process."

Australia's Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said that Australian Government welcomed the resolution of the Second Committee of the United Nation General Assembly (UNGA) to extend the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for a further five years.

The DBCDE said it would like to see the organisation retain an open and participatory membership.

"Australia has always supported the participation of civil society and the private sector in the IGF and regards their participation as being integral to the IGF's success," a spokesman told iTnews.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/242051,un ... tions.aspx



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Re: The first global cyber war has begun

Postby semper occultus » Sat Dec 18, 2010 5:15 pm

I see the Deep Politics Forum got hacked yesterday.....deflector shields on maximum Mr Scott :

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Deep_Politics_Forum
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