Online Activists, Hackers Recent Actions Getting Under the Skin of Government Officials

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Action for Freedom — 1 Comment

In light of recent attacks by internet activist groups, the United States and other Governments are finally realizing that the threat of attack is very real indeed.

Anonymous

Turkey

About a week ago, Officials in Turkey arrested 32 members of clandestine Web group Anonymous for their alleged involvement in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Turkish government Web sites.

Suspects were arrested in a dozen Turkish cities, including Ankara and Istanbul, according to state-run news agency, Anatolia.

Anonymous announced that it had “launched a successful DDoS attack against the Turkish government, taking down several official government Web sites.” That attack was in response to Internet censorship in the country; the government plans to implement a filter on Internet browsing on August 22.

Operation Malaysia

The Malaysian Government became the latest target of the online hacker group Anonymous on June 14. At least 41 government sites were disrupted by the attack, although the Malaysian Government is not releasing the specific names of the sites in question. Officials were quick to point out that “no personal or financial data were compromised” in an attempt to downplay the magnitude of the attacks. The incident is still under investigation by the Malaysian Government.

LulzSec

According to the site Good Morning Silicon Valley, the United States is taking their own stand against hackers.

The FBI early Tuesday seized servers from a data center in Reston, Va., as part of its investigation of LulzSec, the hacker group that has claimed responsibility for recent attacks on the websites of FBI affiliates, the CIA, and the U.S. Senate, among others. According to the New York Times’ Bits blog, websites for the Curbed Network, Instapaper and Pinboard were either knocked offline or affected by the FBI raid, although the Curbed sites appear to be up and running today. More than 120 websites were affected, Reutersreports, citing the rather unhappy CEO of DigitalOne, the Switzerland company that owns the Virginia-based Web-hosting firm.

Another security-related example: In Australia, a domain registrar and Web-hosting service called Distribute.IT said 4,800 websites are “unrecoverable” after what it says was a deliberate hacking attack to take down its business a couple of weeks ago. LulzSec is being mentioned as a suspect in that attack, too.

And speaking of LulzSec, the man arrested by British authorities yesterday was charged with cyber crimes today in connection with hacking into the CIA website. Ryan Cleary, 19, is believed to be tied to the hacking group, although LulzSec denied it on Twitter yesterday.

Obviously The United States Government is concerned, or they would not be so aggressively pursuing these leads. This is exactly what it will take to get the message across to these governments. We will not stand for censorship and the denial of basic human rights!