[Solar-general] 10 Ways Hackers Have Punked Corporations and Oppressive Governments

[Nicolás Reynolds]

http://www.alternet.org/media/148521/10_kickass_pranks_hackers_have_used_to_punk_corporations_and_oppressive_governments?page=entire
10 Ways Hackers Have Punked Corporations and Oppressive Governments

Over the past two decades hacktivism has been used to target all centers of
power.

/October 19, 2010/ Â | Â 


WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been much in the news lately, but
hacktivism -- the nontraditional use of computing technology to advance
political causes -- has been around for a long time. Here we offer a primer
on 10 of the most significant hacktivist actions of all time.

*1. Electronic Disturbance Theater*

In 1998, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) developed and utilized a tool
called Floodnet to target the Pentagon, the White House, the School of the
Americas, the office of Mexico’s president, the Mexican Stock Exchange and
the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, all in support of the Zapatista guerrilla
movement in Mexico. Floodnet, which has subsequently been released as part
of EDT’s “Disturbance Developer Kit,� allowed users to participate in a
sit-in attack on these sites by a simple click on an icon on EDT's Web site.
The Floodnet software then directed the participating computers to
continually attack the target Web sites. It has been estimated that 10,000
people accessed Floodnet in this two-day action resulting in targeted
servers being hit at a rate of 600,000 hits per minute.

*2. The Internet Black Tigers (Sri Lanka)*

An offshoot of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil, the Black Tigers showed that
slick tools like Floodnet weren’t necessary to carry out a denial of service
attack. The Tigers, protesting the Sri Lankan government, organized email
bombings (flooding servers with email) that attacked the Sri Lankan
consulates in Seoul and Ottowa, taking them offline. The message flooding
the servers was also quite simple: "We are the Internet Black Tigers and
we’re doing this to disrupt your communications."

*3. Hong Kong Blondes*

The Hong Kong Blondes was an underground network of Chinese students spread
across at least three continents. It was started by Blondie Wong, who had
reportedly witnessed his father being stoned to death during the 1966-'76
Cultural Revolution. Primarily protesting censorship and the violations of
human rights that occurred in China, the group launched cyberattacks against
the "Great Wall" -- a series of firewalls put in place to block access to
Western Internet sites. With members operating inside and outside of China,
the group claimed to have found significant security holes within Chinese
government computer networks and claimed to have defaced government Web
sites, torn down firewalls and even disabled Chinese communication
satellites. They worked to forewarn political dissidents of imminent
arrests.

*4. WANK Worm*

According to Julian Assange, the WANK worm is the first instance of
hacktivism. On Oct. 16, 1989, during the Cold War when nuclear war was an
immediate possibility, hackers hit the NASA computers with the WANK Worm.
Two days prior to the launch of the plutonium-fueled /Galileo/ space probe
from the Kennedy Space Station, NASA employees logged on to see a humorous
yet frightening welcome screen: "Your computer has been officially WANKed.
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war," and
"Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat." The machines
of the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA worldwide had been penetrated by
the anti-nuclear WANK (WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS) worm.

Once inside NASA’s system, the WANK worm began to travel through the network
of interconnected computers, crawling through any holes in the security
system. While the worm attack did not stop the shuttle launch, the recovery
from the attack did require a massive expenditure of money and effort.
Because the worm avoided attacking the computers in Australia and New
Zealand and the worm source code showed specific instructions to avoid
infecting machines in New Zealand, it is suspected that the attack
originated from Australia. Some have credited the Melbourne-based hackers,
Electron and Phoenix.

*5. Net-strike Attack Devised by the Strano Network*

On December 21, 1995, a group called Strano Network conducted what is
recognized as the first Internet sit-in. The action targeted the Web sites
of various French government agencies to protest French nuclear and social
policies. A web sit-in occurs when the attackers generate a sufficient
volume of traffic to a Web site, preventing any legitimate traffic from
accessing the site. In this case participants from all over the world were
instructed to point their browsers toward designated sites and constantly
reload the pages. Because of the excessive traffic, the targeted Web sites
were made unavailable.

*6. UrBaN Ka0s*

On June 30th, 1997, the Portuguese hacking group UrBaN Ka0s hacked and
defaced the site of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Republic of
Indonesia and 25 other military and government sites as part of the global
protest against the Indonesian government. The goal was to support and bring
attention to the people of Timor, who had been oppressed and violated for
decades by the Indonesian government. It is by most accounts the first
large-scale hacktivist action.

*7. Toy Wars*

In 1999 an online toy retailer called eToys filed suit against a group of
European artists for their use of the web address etoy.com – despite the
fact that the artists had been using that Web site for two years before
eToys.com came into existence. Depressingly, but not surprisingly, the court
sided with the corporation, granting an injunction against etoy on Nov. 29
of that year. What eToys didn’t count on was a group of hacktivists,
incensed by the injustice of the court decision, launching an internet
sit-in against eToys.com from Dec. 15-25, effectively clogging the Web site
during the Christmas shopping season. What was interesting about the sit-in
was that it was structured as an online game in which the goal of players
was the devaluation of eToys stock. And indeed, eToy’s stock began to fall
immediately after the campaign started, and the company went out of business
within a short period of time. Some commentators consider the sit-in to be a
significant contributing factor to the corporation’s collapse.

*8. The World’s Fantabulous Defacers*

In November 2000, one of the most prolific hacktivist goups of all time
emerged and operated for about two years, defacing, by some estimates, more
than 400 Web sites during its operation. Called the World’s Fantabulous
Defacers, its modus operandi was to deface institutional Web sites by
inserting flash videos and audio files that highlighted human rights
violations against Muslim populations (the goal being to raise “global
awareness� – which presumably explains why the defacements were in English).
Alexandra Samuel, then a PhD student, interviewed two of the principle
actors of WFD (M0r0n and nightman), and learned that they had a fairly large
portfolio of causes in the Muslim world:

We have defaced FOR many issues, if you look at our defacements it says
“FREE KASHMIR, PALESTINE, LIFT THE SANCTIONS ON IRAQ, FREE CHECHNIA.� So you
see we are FOR all those people suffering in the world against atrocities!

The WFD appeared to be based in Pakistan (that is certainly consistent with
their targets), and they ranged from an interuniversity library network in
India to the Web site of the Newspaper Association of America, a Chinese
computer company, and a commercial Web site advertising the “Midwest Source
for Hip-Hop Info and Gear.� The group itself took its most important
defacements to be of the Bollywood Stock Exchange and Cricketbulls.com (a
site that trades imaginary shares in leading Indian cricket players). The
group supposedly ceased to be active in 2002, and there is some speculation
that it was absorbed into some of the larger Muslim hacktivist groups that
continue to exist today.

*9. PROJECT CHANOLOGY*

Project Chanology (also called Operation Chanology) was a protest movement
against the practices of the Church of Scientology by Anonymous, a loosely
unorganized Internet-based group that emerged from the 4chan message boards.
The project was started as a “mental warfare� response to the Church of
Scientology's attempts to prevent the online sharing of a video interview
with actor/Scientologist Tom Cruise.

The project was publicly launched with a video posted to YouTube, "Message
to Scientology," on January 21, 2008. The project's goals were to "take down
all Scientology Web sites as an immediate act of retaliatory censorship,
counteract Scientology's attempts to suppress the videos (and other cult
materials) by constantly reposting them, and publicize the cult's
well-documented history of employing suppressive and violent tactics to mask
its illegal or immoral activities." The initial cyber attack, which came in
the form of a distributed denial of service attack, was followed by black
faxes, prank calls, and other activities intended to disrupt the Church of
Scientology's operations.

*10. Operation Payback Is a Bitch*

Anonymous has been back in action in recent weeks, with the launch of
Operation Payback Is a Bitch. Operation Payback started because the RIAA
(Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture
Association of America) have been hiring law firms and programming companies
to take down Torrent sites (peer-to-peer computer networks used to share
movies and music and other digital media). The stated goal of Operation
Payback is to put an end to what Anonymous perceives to be lobbyist-driven
infringements of personal freedom online. To counter these actions,
Anonymous has launched an elaborate cyberwar campaign against the
entertainment companies and the firms that were hired to hunt down and sue
the alleged infringers. In recent weeks, Anonymous has launched DDoS attacks
against the Web sites of RIAA, Aiplex, and ACS:Law, as well as Gallant
MacMillan and its client the Ministry of Sound. All these sites have been
taken down for several hours.

The real damage to ACS:Law, however, came after the DDoS attack when, in
their haste to put everything in order, ACS:Law exposed the backup of their
confidential files containing confidential information. The emails of its
only lawyer, Andrew Crossley, in addition to thousands of personal records
that were handed over by Internet Service Providers (including Sky, BT and
Plusnet) in their hunt for alleged infringers appeared on the Web site,
unencrypted. This in turn exposed the crass and humiliating tactics the
company used to extract money from alleged infringers through out-of-court
settlements. The leaked documents also revealed that only one-fifth of the
money collected from damages paid was given to the rights holders, meaning
the law firm kept 80 percent of the money before paying ISPs and IP tracking
companies.

Over the past two decades hacktivism has expanded its set of methods and
also has been successfully used to target all centers of power, ranging from
governments and corporations, to religious institutions and well-funded
lobbying groups. As a consequence, hacktivist methods and tools are now used
fluently by tens of thousands of people around the world. Current government
obsession with WikiLeaks is pointless; the jinni is out of the bottle.

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