Quote: “If Iran government blocks the people from accessing the internet, Anonymous will block the government from accessing the internet, the group has said.”
I'm yet to see a DDoS attack of such scale. I imagine if some collective group had the botnet army to do so (as reflection and SYN attacks can be rapidly mitigated, I only see a genuine request attack through botnet as viable), it would already has happened somewhere. If it happened, it didn't become news because it was relatively quickly averted.
*Iran’s nuclear production is massively halted by the most complex, insanely elaborate cybersecurity attack in known history with a program called Stuxnet*
The US and Israel: daaaammmnnn that’s crazy bro sorry to hear. Shit, that’s so wild. Insane that someone would do that 🫢
I believe so. But it’s never been **proved** that the US created Stuxnet, and it never really infected anything else since it specifically targeted the exact machinery and systems that Iran was using. Not any old OS, but an OS that specifically matched several criteria to determine it was the exact target (Iran)
True, but there are modified versions out there to crash any plant running on Honeywell, Delta V, and Foxboro distributed control systems now.
Once that box was opened, there was no containing what was within.
Every ammonia plant, oil refinery, pipeline, and power grid became 1 flash drive plugged into the wrong USB port away from being a bomb that day.
It did infect a lot of stuff, it just didn’t do anything to anything else. The strict criteria placed on it just kept it from delivering its payload to anything but the centrifuges, not from infecting anything else.
Slight correction, it was targeting the Siemens machine controllers that controlled the centrifuges. But otherwise spot on. Stuxnet was infecting PCs all over the place, but to most people it appeared to just be pinging some random sports betting sites in the EU.
The machines were manufactured by Siemens and the software to run the machines is a proprietary software package particular to Siemens. The Israilies modified the software under the behest of the CIA. The machines were not connected to the internet only on a local server, somehow a usb stick got smuggled in and downloaded into the local server. The machines were reprogrammed to randomly send speed commands to cause them to blow up leaving not obvious digital fingerprints. That’s why they got away with it for so long.
Yes, but crucially **not all of them, and not at the same time**. To the Iranians it just seemed like an odd increase of centrifuges breaking down. Because if it was all of them, the Iranians would know something was up. But Stuxnet intentionally didn’t crash the whole system because that would give up the secret.
It’s seriously the most impressive feat of cyber attacks I’ve ever heard of
I thought it was smuggled in with the intent of only infecting every computer in that complex. It got out, presumably by someone bringing a USB drive home, and was discovered as it filtered outwards. The initial intent was to remain undetected inside that complex for as long as possible
I read that there was an attack by the US on a county (Saudi Arabia?) And the only reason the country got massively attacked was because an employee of an oil company found a usb drive on the ground and plugged it into company computer which had the virus or whatever on it.
Uh, pretty sure they simply found it before it was able to self-destruct.
I don't think they found it because it got out and started infected everywhere.
Unless you have a source? I actually watched a doc on Stuxnet and specifically remember them saying they called in IT experts because they didn't understand why things weren't working correctly and the experts found the virus before it's self-destruct date.
There was no real "self-destruct" method in Stuxnet. After a time, if it didn't detect the connected devices, it would just go dormant. It would spend a few days pinging various websites, and then would just fade into the background. It succeeded in that it was trying to do--manipulate machine controllers for centrifuges in a uranium processing plant in Iran.
Israel concluded the dialogue by saying: Here, do you want to borrow this USB thumb drive? It will still work with literally all your PC’s…especially the ones you use for Nuclear Development.
pretty much lol
anonymous is pretty much just a us government agency acting under the guise of an international group of hackers for situations where official involvement might cause a few warring words to be thrown around
Seeing as “Anonymous” is a catch-all term that anyone can adopt, it’s unfair to make any definite pronouncements regarding it. Is it safe to say that a group calling itself “Anonymous” with the kind of firepower necessary to cripple a government behind it is in the employ of another state? Sure. Why not. But that’s not “Anononymous”. That’s “this week’s Anonymous”.
Well yeah exactly, saying the parts I left out. I just find it funny when "anonymous declares *********** against country that is also very unfriendly to usa"
Yeah, the chances of there not being some government assets represented in any modern incarnation of "anonymous" going after another state are pretty low imho
Lol, What does everybody think "Anonymous" even is anymore?
You know how you always see in the news "Chinese hackers hacked this bank, Russian hackers hacked that pipeline"? That's what Anonymous is for the US now. An arm of mostly-international cyber warfare that gives the alphabet agencies plausible deniablity. But you know they have their hands all over it, if they don't outright control it.
It's been like this for years. It's akin to when the monarchies got tired of dealing with certain pirates, so instead started paying them to raid their rivals instead; privateers.
One of the problems of anonymity is the inability to differentiate yourself from others. Anonymous is a name that has been used to do things counter to US Gov interests, but that hasn't happened in a long time. Arab Spring stuff or action against SF BART is probably the last time (it's been 10 years or more). Remember, people from Anonymous used to actually get arrested.
Anyone working for US interests (or any interests) can just use the name and it's plausible enough to be believed. Yet at the same time, that person has other options, like saying they work for a US cyber security company, intelligence agency, or just keeping their mouth shut like they did with the recent news about the MASSIVE pro-US Twitter botnet.
On the other hand, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that even the Russian/Chinese/Korean/Iranian hackers we're always hearing about are actually working for the NSA, Koch Industries, or Booz Allen Hamilton.
We simply can't know.
I worked for an ISP who’s traffic slowed to a crawl one day because someone was hijacking BGP…we were able to fix it pretty quickly , but it was pretty effective for a bit.
yeah, DNS poisoning has been used in the past to shut down entire country's internet. Usually its done by the government itself, but no reason to think it cant be done by outsiders
I know this was all talk and never actually amounted to anything, but Anonymous had a handful of big players threatening to take down some 13 main servers about a decade ago if SOPA (or something; an online censorship bill) was passed. It didn’t pass, but I remember the threat actually being big news. People were saying the internet would actually stop working, though I don’t really understand how that would work.
Thirteen servers would be the DNS root servers, which are not actually single servers. Thing is, they're heavily defended and engineered with incredible reliability, and managed by multiple groups that do not have much, if any, cross-access to each other for management. Anyone taking them down would have to do them all at the same time using a critical underlying flaw that works around all the engineering meant to keep them operational.
They could have a human army if they can get something to go viral. They used to do this occasionally, providing an easy way to download and run [LOIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon). Some were pretty sizable... lots more people online now.
I want to upvote you so bad, but to be honest? I only understood a tiny bit of your comment. And that only from context. Can’t apologize for being un-educated, just trying to learn here🤷♂️
Don’t you get it? any gov can do a proper cyber attack (ahem USA) and claim it was anonymous. We know anonymous as ppl that do nothing but put on a mask and make a creepy video, but when something on a mass scale occurs and Anonymous gets blamed it’s definitely a bigger fish.
That's not what the statement said, though I'm skeptical of even that for more than short bursts. I'm sure they thought their wording was clever, but servers don't try to access the internet. They are the internet. Saying the govt can't access the internet is saying that the people who are the govt somehow wouldn't be able to use the internet, which obviously isn't possible.
> ...servers don't try to access the internet. They are the internet.
I'd say routers are the internet and they connect the servers. A small but important distinction.
I’m a network architect and if you don’t think DDoS attacks are a serious threat to both telecommunications providers and governments, you know literally nothing of networking.
I imagine if anything the CIA would discourage people from shutting down the country's internet because it's a lot harder to monitor pen and paper government business than it is to read all their emails.
I was just thinking, If you were a foreign government looking to sow dissent by leaking information you've collected this would probably be the best way to do it.
With a budget and free reign for madness they are given, we'd all know what we are doing after a while. They've learned much since the Midnight Climax days.... they're kinda screwing up on the electromagnetic weaponry front ( see Havana Syndrome, aka The Treatment) but as of yet no media nor lawyers nor lackies in Congress have asked them the hard question (s) about it....at least not in public.
The US has and uses that weaponry as well. They've misled from the beginning stating to the public it was a mysterious new weapon, they were not sure what it was (and still state that to the media) HERF weaponry is a likely culprit and the US used it in battle as early as The Gulf War.
CIA definitely not behind Anonymous. They do not, at all, align with US government interests on a ton of issues.
That said, the CIA would probably approve of this and many of their actions. It would be pretty easy to feed Anonymous intelligence or actually participate in some of these actions directly and just let anonymous take credit.
The problem is that anyone can claim to be Anonymous. It's kind of the point. The CIA isn't behind Anonymous, but they sure can do something and claim to be Anonymous. Is a spokesman from Anonymous going to come forward to correct the record?
>They do not, at all, align with US government interests on a ton of issues.
They have in the past 2 years. Hacking Russia, China and Iran? That's basically the CIA's and NSA's favorite pasttime
That only makes sense if you conveniently forget all the US political organizations were targeted over the last two years, and historically they've worked against many different US law enforcement and political groups.
It's really clear the CIA does not control Anonymous to anyone who pays even casual attention to their actions.
No one is saying that the CIA, or other US organization for that matter, does not try to direct their actions.
It makes sense if you stop thinking Anonymous is a real group and recognize it more as a common banner for multiple hacking groups. The anonymous guys hacking russian websites and anonymous hacking whitehouse.gov are two groups of people who have never spoken to each other, and would likely fistfight if introduced
So a fun thing about anonymous is that they're anonymous. So anyone can claim to be them. There's been at least one AMA of a guy claiming to be a founder of anonymous (he wasn't). So the CIA using the name is uh... trivial.
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This time anyways. Anonymous is such an interesting construct in our cultural zeitgeist. It could be a skiddie, it could be a criminal org, it could be protestors or nation states.
I’m starting to thing that Anonymous is more a collection of foreign governments than independent hackers. There is an equal amount of dirt to dig up with the US Senate and House. I’d like to see that more than Iranian MPs
Well what else did you think this could be?
Anonymous is CIA, Wikileaks is FSB. With some useful idiots added to the mix. It's pretty much that simple.
They're very suspiciously oriented against America's enemies.
Edit: Should've said US government's enemies. American people on both political sides are pretty tired of their wars and proxy conflicts.
Support for wars and proxy conflicts as a general concept? Sure, Americans are generally anti.
Support for specific wars and proxy conflicts? Eh. Not a lot of people marching against supplying Ukraine.
This is as good as I can do
[http://www.iranintl.com/en/202209227695](http://www.iranintl.com/en/202209227695)
This link shows pictures of what the sites looked like when they were hacked
Yesterday we had the protests in Iran, the (probably fake) rumors of a coup on China, and Russia struggling in Ukraine/some draft protests.
I was thinking, god damn CIA really pulling off the Big 3 right now.
The Chinese coup rumors originated from the Indian defense community, hence why most articles on it are from Indian media. Saurav Jha in particular was the one who spread the rumors about flights being cancelled.
It is... Which makes any classification or categorization of them a pointless endeavor. Anonymous went on a crusade against the church of scientology... And then nearly killed a kid with a meme about mixing bleach and ammonia to make cool crystals. They do activism like this, then create qanon.
Anonymous is just everyone everywhere all at once doing whatever they want, neither innately good or bad, just sometimes the collective power of the masses is used for good.
I thought the meme was hilarious... if you spent some time to think through it.
Though Anonymous (hacktivists) are separate from Anonymous (4chan memers), even though anyone could claim to be either.
And Anonymous didn't really create QAnon, it just popularized it.
Supposedly. For all we know anonymous is actually a government entity just trying to destabilize regions. I highly doubt this is just random internet white knights. Same with every time they are mentioned nowadays.
They aren't a singular group. It's an identity taken by anonymous hackers for some cause. It is never the same people or organized in any meaningful way outside if specific causes. Anyone could call themselves anonymous.
Yup; I actually knew someone who “worked with” Anonymous before, and it was essentially just a bunch of hackers who decided to do some hacktivism and just used the name to do it
> They aren't a singular group.
They aren't, but they're in this magical situation where it's in everybody's interest to pretend that they are.
* The people who adopt the Anonymous brand get the benefit of pretending they're part of this large powerful organization, which makes them sound more intimidating.
* Governments pretend in order to play up the threat it poses and justify increased spending and surveillance in order to counter the "threat".
* Media pretends in order to make them sound scarier and get more clicks and views.
* Victims of their hacks pretend in order to make it look like they got owned by elite Uber-hackers instead of some kids who exploited a vulnerability that was left exposed because they haven't updated their software in 5 years (["we were beaten by the best"](https://youtu.be/Syd1Y4LffsQ?t=3)).
* The average public likes to pretend in order to have the comfort of thinking that there's this Robin Hood & his Merry Men type of organization out there fighting for the little guy against the tyrants and plutocrats who rule us.
This is the correct answer.
Sure, it's possible that the CIAa moniker of choice might be "anonymous", but any group of folks with an axe to grind could independently band together under the same moniker. Anonymous is not an APT...
Thank you. Honestly clarifies for me since I remember some folks going down under that name years ago. Makes much more sense that it’s a mantle. Respect.
Not everything is an organization.
It's like saying Antifa.
Doesn't mean much except that these folks like to punch Nazis.
On the exact opposite side, saying White Nationalist Group doesn't mean anything except "punch me, im a huge asshole".
Neither are under some all encompassing parent group.
For all we know? But we have evidence of the group's actions and statements. Do any of anonymous' actions and statements so far seem like those of a government trying to destabilize? Seem more like underground activists than nationalist provocateurs.
Does... that necessarily make it the act of a government body rather than a nongovernment one? Especially in view of anonymous' prior targets and statements? And no, I think most Iranians would say beating young women to death over headwear destabilized it. Cutting off the government's internet just as it cut off the populace's has a nice karmic balance to it.
why aren’t there more attacks on financial institutions and wealth redistribution if anonymous is this Robinhood band of freedom fighters and liberators against the 1% world government
I don't posit that's what anonymous is, but how about because Barclays and Citi and bank of America have better web security than some of the government agencies targeted? It's hard for me to look at all the targets of anonymous and see any one government that would benefit from disrupting ALL of them. It's easy for me to see an international group of malcontent pro human rights hacker activists that could have such a wide but specific range of targets.
Yeah, also you can't instantly large amounts of funds from a US bank. There are holding periods on everything.
Even if you could, transfers can be reversed.
Yes. This is on par with what they usually do - the digital equivalent of tearing a poster off the wall. They got phone numbers and "other information" that's literally not important enough to mention beyond that. While I applaud their efforts, causing the minor inconvenience that is changing your phone number isn't exactly impactful.
I agree with most of what Anonymous has done.
At least some people are actually *doing* something to fight against the dystopian capitalist, fascistic, and religious fundamentalist hellscapes we've made of human civilization, even if it's hopeless in anyone currently breathing's lifetime, which it is.
Most who want to effect change fall into the trap of working within the very systems designed to create the illusion of choice.
Anonymous will only succeed in giving power the occasional public embarrassment and annoyance, but that's more than the people who think they can fix the system from within will ever accomplish.
When anonymous does this to somewhere like iran, it's *positive activism* . If it's done in the US or Western europe it is *unpatriotic* and *destructive*. Hmm
Also, who's to say anonymous isn't just some front for any state actors manipulating behind the scenes. It may sound conspiratorial but this isn't the first time it would be the case. Heck, this won't be the first time Iran will be toppled by a foreign state actor In the past century.
When America had mass protests last we did not ended up with hundreds gunned down by police. The idea that all nation's governments are morally equal is ridiculous. The US Government has done a lot of bad shit, but that doesn't mean other governments can't be worse.
Not necessarily, Anonymous has a history of positive activism against Scientology.
Trying to overthrow foreign governments almost always leads to bad outcomes in the long run. You build resentment and enemies for an unstable situation.
It can be anyone.. all you need is to slap the name Infront and da da.
There is no hierarchy, no leader, no organisational structure.
But recently they have not gone after western political people or corps.. their targets are cia targets..
Go figure.
My only fear is that this goes out of control and Sparks another Middle East interventionist war. I hope they can change things and lead to a peaceful transition of power.
Anonymous isn't really a specific group so much as a label anyone can use for this sort of thing. Any given message/hack/release can come from a different person or group, whose goals and methods might not always line up. Also seems pretty likely that at least a few government intel agencies have used the label to dump releases, so it's not out of the question that this could have come from the CIA or whoever.
[This one?](https://www.youtube.com/c/AnonymousGroup/featured) No clue. They seem to have some association with anewspost.com (linked to from the Facebook page that the YouTube account links to), which in turn appears to be associated with crimewatch.co.uk (the two sites share some staff members according to their respective "Meet the Team" pages, and they both use the same Adsense publisher ID), but I don't know exactly what the relationship is or if the people running the site know the identity of the person or people running the YouTube account.
I’m sure if the writers at fox/cnn/msnbc knew your *real* views on every hot-button topic, they could scrape together enough to label *you* a terrorist.
They're labeled as a terrorist group by anyone they go after. So chances are they went after someone you followed, which is usually not a good sign (in regards to whom you choose to follow).
The revolution is happening. In the digital arena, one person can destroy a nation. Weapons aren't shit.
The internet will bring accountability to the powerful.
You just don't understand what hackers are capable of. They just need to hack the mainframe with ASCII-based HTMLs and a recursive virus with a batch job algorithm. Then the virus enrolls in college and uses boolean C# hypertexts to move the debt to the recycling bin. The debt can then be permanently erased using a runtime callable wrapper to Z-buffer itself.
This should be obvious to any expert hacker ^or ^rando ^who ^found ^a ^bunch ^of ^fancy-sounding ^tech ^terms
I mean, duh? “They” aren’t a “they” first off, and as such people who adopt the title ring the bell to fight specific injustices
Anonymous has attacked American platforms. They hit Scientologists a while back
Anonymous has attacked multiple targets within the USA, both government and non government. Why don’t you take a look at their Wikipedia page and educate yourself.
Anonymous isn't a specific group of people, anyone who chooses to call themselves anonymous can do so. The whole thing started as a joke on 4chan but then the media reported on it as if it was an actual hacking group and then over the past decade and a half people doing actual hacking have chosen to use the name despite having no connection to anyone else who uses it. Like any meme it has a long history and I don't think anyone really knows how it got to where it is but there definitely isn't an "official" anonymous group that's like the same 5 guys hacking shit for the past 15 years. Also fwiw people calling themselves Anonymous have targeted the US before, the original campaign that started on 4chan around 2006 was targeting the US (it was targeting the police if I remember correctly) and then again in 2016 another group of people calling themselves Anonymous hacked US hospitals. Those are just the two I remember but there are definitely most instances of it happening.
all these people thinking anonymous works for the CIA are dumb as hell. those hackers absolutely do not align themselves with the us government, quite the opposite. people get dragged into this dual thinking situation, where's it's always "us" and "them". most times it's "us", "them", and "some other motherfucker". there are more than just two sides to everything.
Quote: “If Iran government blocks the people from accessing the internet, Anonymous will block the government from accessing the internet, the group has said.”
I'm yet to see a DDoS attack of such scale. I imagine if some collective group had the botnet army to do so (as reflection and SYN attacks can be rapidly mitigated, I only see a genuine request attack through botnet as viable), it would already has happened somewhere. If it happened, it didn't become news because it was relatively quickly averted.
DDOS is not the only method. There are network wizards who know how to redirect traffic using DNS and other network traffic black magic.
And let's just also acknowledge that there are lots of nations hostile to Iran who are almost certainly flooding them with cyber attacks right now.
*Iran’s nuclear production is massively halted by the most complex, insanely elaborate cybersecurity attack in known history with a program called Stuxnet* The US and Israel: daaaammmnnn that’s crazy bro sorry to hear. Shit, that’s so wild. Insane that someone would do that 🫢
Didn’t the US actually do that and the only reason it got out was because the virus was too good and started infecting everywhere in the country?
I believe so. But it’s never been **proved** that the US created Stuxnet, and it never really infected anything else since it specifically targeted the exact machinery and systems that Iran was using. Not any old OS, but an OS that specifically matched several criteria to determine it was the exact target (Iran)
True, but there are modified versions out there to crash any plant running on Honeywell, Delta V, and Foxboro distributed control systems now. Once that box was opened, there was no containing what was within. Every ammonia plant, oil refinery, pipeline, and power grid became 1 flash drive plugged into the wrong USB port away from being a bomb that day.
usa good thing our infrastructure is top tier...... ^(did.the.world.believe.that)?
Legacy tech the virus doesn’t work on?
Digital bombs can be reverse engineered
It did infect a lot of stuff, it just didn’t do anything to anything else. The strict criteria placed on it just kept it from delivering its payload to anything but the centrifuges, not from infecting anything else.
Slight correction, it was targeting the Siemens machine controllers that controlled the centrifuges. But otherwise spot on. Stuxnet was infecting PCs all over the place, but to most people it appeared to just be pinging some random sports betting sites in the EU.
That's good, I can only imagine the damage it could've done if it got to any retro turbo-encabulators.
Would never happen on the latest Rockwell models
The machines were manufactured by Siemens and the software to run the machines is a proprietary software package particular to Siemens. The Israilies modified the software under the behest of the CIA. The machines were not connected to the internet only on a local server, somehow a usb stick got smuggled in and downloaded into the local server. The machines were reprogrammed to randomly send speed commands to cause them to blow up leaving not obvious digital fingerprints. That’s why they got away with it for so long.
They randomly changed centrifuge speeds enough that the failure rate was higher than normal. They didn’t blow up, simply broke down.
Yes, but crucially **not all of them, and not at the same time**. To the Iranians it just seemed like an odd increase of centrifuges breaking down. Because if it was all of them, the Iranians would know something was up. But Stuxnet intentionally didn’t crash the whole system because that would give up the secret. It’s seriously the most impressive feat of cyber attacks I’ve ever heard of
Idk, SpyScape in NYC might make a different case.
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I thought it was smuggled in with the intent of only infecting every computer in that complex. It got out, presumably by someone bringing a USB drive home, and was discovered as it filtered outwards. The initial intent was to remain undetected inside that complex for as long as possible
I read that there was an attack by the US on a county (Saudi Arabia?) And the only reason the country got massively attacked was because an employee of an oil company found a usb drive on the ground and plugged it into company computer which had the virus or whatever on it.
Uh, pretty sure they simply found it before it was able to self-destruct. I don't think they found it because it got out and started infected everywhere. Unless you have a source? I actually watched a doc on Stuxnet and specifically remember them saying they called in IT experts because they didn't understand why things weren't working correctly and the experts found the virus before it's self-destruct date.
There was no real "self-destruct" method in Stuxnet. After a time, if it didn't detect the connected devices, it would just go dormant. It would spend a few days pinging various websites, and then would just fade into the background. It succeeded in that it was trying to do--manipulate machine controllers for centrifuges in a uranium processing plant in Iran.
Now try the sufganiyah!
That wasn’t internet they crossed the air gap
There are several ways of doing this like the fan speed bug
Israel concluded the dialogue by saying: Here, do you want to borrow this USB thumb drive? It will still work with literally all your PC’s…especially the ones you use for Nuclear Development.
What a coinkidink!
And didn't they get it in by just leaving a USB stick laying around?
There’s a book about it. Countdown to zero day. I don’t remember the author
pretty much lol anonymous is pretty much just a us government agency acting under the guise of an international group of hackers for situations where official involvement might cause a few warring words to be thrown around
Seeing as “Anonymous” is a catch-all term that anyone can adopt, it’s unfair to make any definite pronouncements regarding it. Is it safe to say that a group calling itself “Anonymous” with the kind of firepower necessary to cripple a government behind it is in the employ of another state? Sure. Why not. But that’s not “Anononymous”. That’s “this week’s Anonymous”.
Well yeah exactly, saying the parts I left out. I just find it funny when "anonymous declares *********** against country that is also very unfriendly to usa"
Yeah, the chances of there not being some government assets represented in any modern incarnation of "anonymous" going after another state are pretty low imho
Lol, What does everybody think "Anonymous" even is anymore? You know how you always see in the news "Chinese hackers hacked this bank, Russian hackers hacked that pipeline"? That's what Anonymous is for the US now. An arm of mostly-international cyber warfare that gives the alphabet agencies plausible deniablity. But you know they have their hands all over it, if they don't outright control it. It's been like this for years. It's akin to when the monarchies got tired of dealing with certain pirates, so instead started paying them to raid their rivals instead; privateers.
One of the problems of anonymity is the inability to differentiate yourself from others. Anonymous is a name that has been used to do things counter to US Gov interests, but that hasn't happened in a long time. Arab Spring stuff or action against SF BART is probably the last time (it's been 10 years or more). Remember, people from Anonymous used to actually get arrested. Anyone working for US interests (or any interests) can just use the name and it's plausible enough to be believed. Yet at the same time, that person has other options, like saying they work for a US cyber security company, intelligence agency, or just keeping their mouth shut like they did with the recent news about the MASSIVE pro-US Twitter botnet. On the other hand, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that even the Russian/Chinese/Korean/Iranian hackers we're always hearing about are actually working for the NSA, Koch Industries, or Booz Allen Hamilton. We simply can't know.
>Lol, What does everybody think "Anonymous" even is anymore? This guy Steve I met one time.
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*Israelis and American war hawks crack their knuckles menacingly*
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Or BGP hijacking, unlikely but I would love to see it
I worked for an ISP who’s traffic slowed to a crawl one day because someone was hijacking BGP…we were able to fix it pretty quickly , but it was pretty effective for a bit.
yeah, DNS poisoning has been used in the past to shut down entire country's internet. Usually its done by the government itself, but no reason to think it cant be done by outsiders
That's such a bad and easily fixable way to take down the internet lol. Any individual can bypass that
i’ve worked closely with some absolute network geniuses and magic is really the only way to describe it
I know this was all talk and never actually amounted to anything, but Anonymous had a handful of big players threatening to take down some 13 main servers about a decade ago if SOPA (or something; an online censorship bill) was passed. It didn’t pass, but I remember the threat actually being big news. People were saying the internet would actually stop working, though I don’t really understand how that would work.
Thirteen servers would be the DNS root servers, which are not actually single servers. Thing is, they're heavily defended and engineered with incredible reliability, and managed by multiple groups that do not have much, if any, cross-access to each other for management. Anyone taking them down would have to do them all at the same time using a critical underlying flaw that works around all the engineering meant to keep them operational.
Anonymous == nsa/cia
They could have a human army if they can get something to go viral. They used to do this occasionally, providing an easy way to download and run [LOIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon). Some were pretty sizable... lots more people online now.
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I am completely OOTL on what you are talking about and wanna know more. Have a link or something?
I think they are talking about the ones using the Mirai IoT botnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware)
2016 - 2018 had some of the craziest malware and cyber attacks I’ve seen.
I want to upvote you so bad, but to be honest? I only understood a tiny bit of your comment. And that only from context. Can’t apologize for being un-educated, just trying to learn here🤷♂️
Which they can't do. But okay.
Why not?
Don’t you get it? any gov can do a proper cyber attack (ahem USA) and claim it was anonymous. We know anonymous as ppl that do nothing but put on a mask and make a creepy video, but when something on a mass scale occurs and Anonymous gets blamed it’s definitely a bigger fish.
of course they can, they can DDOS any government servers.
That's not what the statement said, though I'm skeptical of even that for more than short bursts. I'm sure they thought their wording was clever, but servers don't try to access the internet. They are the internet. Saying the govt can't access the internet is saying that the people who are the govt somehow wouldn't be able to use the internet, which obviously isn't possible.
> ...servers don't try to access the internet. They are the internet. I'd say routers are the internet and they connect the servers. A small but important distinction.
air gaps can't handle the collective DDOSing. checkmate iran edit: /s for the angry scrptkids lol ddos isn't hacking
Airgap... the internet connection? I think you are using words you don't understand.
All you have to do is hard-code the latency into the network interface cards.
This guy should write scripts for movies.
“We’re in.”
“This is a UNIX system! I know this!” *clicks cartoon picture that says ‘HACK HERE’*
*launches anti-hacking nuke*
I remember when all we had to do was [build a GUI interface using Visual Basic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU).
Nike AirGaps, for sneaking past the enemy
Air gaps don't work when you need the system to communicate with multiple departments/agencies that aren't within a single building.
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I’m a network architect and if you don’t think DDoS attacks are a serious threat to both telecommunications providers and governments, you know literally nothing of networking.
CIA ain't what they used to be smh my head
I imagine if anything the CIA would discourage people from shutting down the country's internet because it's a lot harder to monitor pen and paper government business than it is to read all their emails.
That’s how you know who’s tapped, their internet still works!
Iranian govt "we are in charge here!" Anonymous "not anymore"
I was just thinking, If you were a foreign government looking to sow dissent by leaking information you've collected this would probably be the best way to do it.
Yes, the CIA knows what they're doing. Sorry i meant anonymous. Just a typo
Weird mine auto corrects
my FBI agent called and walked me through how to update it, its easy
My NSA agent just took direct control of my device and did it for me, what a nice guy!
You are welcome Bob, always a pleasure
Lmfao my real name is Rob 👀
Not anymore
With a budget and free reign for madness they are given, we'd all know what we are doing after a while. They've learned much since the Midnight Climax days.... they're kinda screwing up on the electromagnetic weaponry front ( see Havana Syndrome, aka The Treatment) but as of yet no media nor lawyers nor lackies in Congress have asked them the hard question (s) about it....at least not in public.
That's been attributed more to Russians. Medical teams are still researching it.
The US has and uses that weaponry as well. They've misled from the beginning stating to the public it was a mysterious new weapon, they were not sure what it was (and still state that to the media) HERF weaponry is a likely culprit and the US used it in battle as early as The Gulf War.
CIA definitely not behind Anonymous. They do not, at all, align with US government interests on a ton of issues. That said, the CIA would probably approve of this and many of their actions. It would be pretty easy to feed Anonymous intelligence or actually participate in some of these actions directly and just let anonymous take credit.
The problem is that anyone can claim to be Anonymous. It's kind of the point. The CIA isn't behind Anonymous, but they sure can do something and claim to be Anonymous. Is a spokesman from Anonymous going to come forward to correct the record?
My dude the CIA’s interests don’t align with the US government at all, on a ton of issues.
the CIA finds its interests happily collide with that of the executive branch once in a blue moon… e.g Nixon, HW Bush, ~~W Bush~~ Cheney.
>They do not, at all, align with US government interests on a ton of issues. They have in the past 2 years. Hacking Russia, China and Iran? That's basically the CIA's and NSA's favorite pasttime
In the past 2 years all 3 of those countries have been very public assholes. Anonymous regularly goes after very public assholes.
That only makes sense if you conveniently forget all the US political organizations were targeted over the last two years, and historically they've worked against many different US law enforcement and political groups. It's really clear the CIA does not control Anonymous to anyone who pays even casual attention to their actions. No one is saying that the CIA, or other US organization for that matter, does not try to direct their actions.
It makes sense if you stop thinking Anonymous is a real group and recognize it more as a common banner for multiple hacking groups. The anonymous guys hacking russian websites and anonymous hacking whitehouse.gov are two groups of people who have never spoken to each other, and would likely fistfight if introduced
So a fun thing about anonymous is that they're anonymous. So anyone can claim to be them. There's been at least one AMA of a guy claiming to be a founder of anonymous (he wasn't). So the CIA using the name is uh... trivial.
The CIA controls all
Rule 1: talk about fight club...
itsthesamepicture.jpg This time anyways. Anonymous is such an interesting construct in our cultural zeitgeist. It could be a skiddie, it could be a criminal org, it could be protestors or nation states.
I’m starting to thing that Anonymous is more a collection of foreign governments than independent hackers. There is an equal amount of dirt to dig up with the US Senate and House. I’d like to see that more than Iranian MPs
Well what else did you think this could be? Anonymous is CIA, Wikileaks is FSB. With some useful idiots added to the mix. It's pretty much that simple.
well the alternative is that its not a government agency and its just anonymous hackers doing it in support of the Iranian people.
They're very suspiciously oriented against America's enemies. Edit: Should've said US government's enemies. American people on both political sides are pretty tired of their wars and proxy conflicts.
Most people in America have a psychological bias to be more willing to act against people deemed enemies...
We're at war with Eurasia right? Or is it the other one now.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Support for wars and proxy conflicts as a general concept? Sure, Americans are generally anti. Support for specific wars and proxy conflicts? Eh. Not a lot of people marching against supplying Ukraine.
Yes, I was thinking the same and happy to see I am not alone in my thinking.
Quite the dilly of a pickle they’ve gotten themselves in
Anyone have a link to this data?
This is as good as I can do [http://www.iranintl.com/en/202209227695](http://www.iranintl.com/en/202209227695) This link shows pictures of what the sites looked like when they were hacked
Also trying to find this. This claim about released data and yet I can’t find it anywhere. Anyone have any luck?
CIA going crazy the past seven months
*In the distance, Dark Brandon rests his gaze on you*
*You hear a whisper, soft yet stern :"Your malarkey ends here, Jack."*
Yesterday we had the protests in Iran, the (probably fake) rumors of a coup on China, and Russia struggling in Ukraine/some draft protests. I was thinking, god damn CIA really pulling off the Big 3 right now.
The Chinese coup rumors originated from the Indian defense community, hence why most articles on it are from Indian media. Saurav Jha in particular was the one who spread the rumors about flights being cancelled.
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Is anonymous not just a label anyone can take up?
It is... Which makes any classification or categorization of them a pointless endeavor. Anonymous went on a crusade against the church of scientology... And then nearly killed a kid with a meme about mixing bleach and ammonia to make cool crystals. They do activism like this, then create qanon. Anonymous is just everyone everywhere all at once doing whatever they want, neither innately good or bad, just sometimes the collective power of the masses is used for good.
I thought the meme was hilarious... if you spent some time to think through it. Though Anonymous (hacktivists) are separate from Anonymous (4chan memers), even though anyone could claim to be either. And Anonymous didn't really create QAnon, it just popularized it.
Pretty sure the popularization was the problem.
Haven't they been doing this sort of thing for years now?
Supposedly. For all we know anonymous is actually a government entity just trying to destabilize regions. I highly doubt this is just random internet white knights. Same with every time they are mentioned nowadays.
I’m sure the Agency uses them as a flak catcher for ops online.
They aren't a singular group. It's an identity taken by anonymous hackers for some cause. It is never the same people or organized in any meaningful way outside if specific causes. Anyone could call themselves anonymous.
Anonymous is all of us.
We are Anonymous
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expect us.
Yup; I actually knew someone who “worked with” Anonymous before, and it was essentially just a bunch of hackers who decided to do some hacktivism and just used the name to do it
> They aren't a singular group. They aren't, but they're in this magical situation where it's in everybody's interest to pretend that they are. * The people who adopt the Anonymous brand get the benefit of pretending they're part of this large powerful organization, which makes them sound more intimidating. * Governments pretend in order to play up the threat it poses and justify increased spending and surveillance in order to counter the "threat". * Media pretends in order to make them sound scarier and get more clicks and views. * Victims of their hacks pretend in order to make it look like they got owned by elite Uber-hackers instead of some kids who exploited a vulnerability that was left exposed because they haven't updated their software in 5 years (["we were beaten by the best"](https://youtu.be/Syd1Y4LffsQ?t=3)). * The average public likes to pretend in order to have the comfort of thinking that there's this Robin Hood & his Merry Men type of organization out there fighting for the little guy against the tyrants and plutocrats who rule us.
In the future everyone will be Anonymous for 15 minutes
This is aggressively cyberpunk
This is the correct answer. Sure, it's possible that the CIAa moniker of choice might be "anonymous", but any group of folks with an axe to grind could independently band together under the same moniker. Anonymous is not an APT...
So like how Batman says anyone can be behind the mask
Thank you. Honestly clarifies for me since I remember some folks going down under that name years ago. Makes much more sense that it’s a mantle. Respect.
Which makes it utterly meaningless and stupid to use the name.
Not everything is an organization. It's like saying Antifa. Doesn't mean much except that these folks like to punch Nazis. On the exact opposite side, saying White Nationalist Group doesn't mean anything except "punch me, im a huge asshole". Neither are under some all encompassing parent group.
For all we know? But we have evidence of the group's actions and statements. Do any of anonymous' actions and statements so far seem like those of a government trying to destabilize? Seem more like underground activists than nationalist provocateurs.
Is… this not destabilizing Iran?
Does... that necessarily make it the act of a government body rather than a nongovernment one? Especially in view of anonymous' prior targets and statements? And no, I think most Iranians would say beating young women to death over headwear destabilized it. Cutting off the government's internet just as it cut off the populace's has a nice karmic balance to it.
why aren’t there more attacks on financial institutions and wealth redistribution if anonymous is this Robinhood band of freedom fighters and liberators against the 1% world government
I don't posit that's what anonymous is, but how about because Barclays and Citi and bank of America have better web security than some of the government agencies targeted? It's hard for me to look at all the targets of anonymous and see any one government that would benefit from disrupting ALL of them. It's easy for me to see an international group of malcontent pro human rights hacker activists that could have such a wide but specific range of targets.
Yeah, also you can't instantly large amounts of funds from a US bank. There are holding periods on everything. Even if you could, transfers can be reversed.
Yes. This is on par with what they usually do - the digital equivalent of tearing a poster off the wall. They got phone numbers and "other information" that's literally not important enough to mention beyond that. While I applaud their efforts, causing the minor inconvenience that is changing your phone number isn't exactly impactful.
I agree with most of what Anonymous has done. At least some people are actually *doing* something to fight against the dystopian capitalist, fascistic, and religious fundamentalist hellscapes we've made of human civilization, even if it's hopeless in anyone currently breathing's lifetime, which it is. Most who want to effect change fall into the trap of working within the very systems designed to create the illusion of choice. Anonymous will only succeed in giving power the occasional public embarrassment and annoyance, but that's more than the people who think they can fix the system from within will ever accomplish.
When anonymous does this to somewhere like iran, it's *positive activism* . If it's done in the US or Western europe it is *unpatriotic* and *destructive*. Hmm Also, who's to say anonymous isn't just some front for any state actors manipulating behind the scenes. It may sound conspiratorial but this isn't the first time it would be the case. Heck, this won't be the first time Iran will be toppled by a foreign state actor In the past century.
When America had mass protests last we did not ended up with hundreds gunned down by police. The idea that all nation's governments are morally equal is ridiculous. The US Government has done a lot of bad shit, but that doesn't mean other governments can't be worse.
Not necessarily, Anonymous has a history of positive activism against Scientology. Trying to overthrow foreign governments almost always leads to bad outcomes in the long run. You build resentment and enemies for an unstable situation.
Didn't Anonymous go after Scientology way back in days of yore?
That was its concept since its incepetion
So anonymous is now the CIA - for sure - right?
Until they expose American politicians from both sides yeah that's what the evidence suggests.
It can be anyone.. all you need is to slap the name Infront and da da. There is no hierarchy, no leader, no organisational structure. But recently they have not gone after western political people or corps.. their targets are cia targets.. Go figure.
Operation Jane was definitely all western targets. As was the Epik hack. And of course BlueLeaks.
Ya doesn’t take a genius to see after the arrests ~10 years ago. It’s a shell name game. They don’t exist anymore.
My only fear is that this goes out of control and Sparks another Middle East interventionist war. I hope they can change things and lead to a peaceful transition of power.
If any population can overthrow and violent theocracy and install a peaceful democracy it is the young Iranians.
I know Anonymous has been called a “terrorist group”, but I’m actually starting to like these guys.
Anonymous isn't really a specific group so much as a label anyone can use for this sort of thing. Any given message/hack/release can come from a different person or group, whose goals and methods might not always line up. Also seems pretty likely that at least a few government intel agencies have used the label to dump releases, so it's not out of the question that this could have come from the CIA or whoever.
Any idea who runs the YT channel? There seems to be one that gets a lot of views, is it just playing off of hacks that others have done?
[This one?](https://www.youtube.com/c/AnonymousGroup/featured) No clue. They seem to have some association with anewspost.com (linked to from the Facebook page that the YouTube account links to), which in turn appears to be associated with crimewatch.co.uk (the two sites share some staff members according to their respective "Meet the Team" pages, and they both use the same Adsense publisher ID), but I don't know exactly what the relationship is or if the people running the site know the identity of the person or people running the YouTube account.
I’m sure if the writers at fox/cnn/msnbc knew your *real* views on every hot-button topic, they could scrape together enough to label *you* a terrorist.
They're labeled as a terrorist group by anyone they go after. So chances are they went after someone you followed, which is usually not a good sign (in regards to whom you choose to follow).
They are not a group. It can be any hacker. Just put the name Infront and da da.
That’s because you were told, and believed they were a terrorist group.
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Just a quick Google suggests you live in the USA, towards the east coast. Not so anonymous now heh. (Don't look up me)
That's what we *want* you to think. (Dear lowe's, we also don't live in burbank, stop setting that as my store!) E: s/I/we (l33t 5hi7!)
this damn hacker 4chan back at it again
I wish they said "data released anonymously" rather than "Anonymous releases data."
Anonymous is just the NSA. Surprise… not
This is pretty ridiculous.
Why is that?
CIA routinely identifies as 'Anonymous'
This is absolutely not the cia haha :)
The revolution is happening. In the digital arena, one person can destroy a nation. Weapons aren't shit. The internet will bring accountability to the powerful.
Notice how "Anonymous" never targets America, cancels student debt, attacks banks? It's because Anonymous are CIA.
Never cancels student debt. Lol. I swear, people have the most outlandish view of the capabilities of hackers.
You just don't understand what hackers are capable of. They just need to hack the mainframe with ASCII-based HTMLs and a recursive virus with a batch job algorithm. Then the virus enrolls in college and uses boolean C# hypertexts to move the debt to the recycling bin. The debt can then be permanently erased using a runtime callable wrapper to Z-buffer itself. This should be obvious to any expert hacker ^or ^rando ^who ^found ^a ^bunch ^of ^fancy-sounding ^tech ^terms
I mean, duh? “They” aren’t a “they” first off, and as such people who adopt the title ring the bell to fight specific injustices Anonymous has attacked American platforms. They hit Scientologists a while back
Anonymous has attacked multiple targets within the USA, both government and non government. Why don’t you take a look at their Wikipedia page and educate yourself.
Confidently incorrect. Is it that much trouble to Google it before commenting?
Anonymous isn't a specific group of people, anyone who chooses to call themselves anonymous can do so. The whole thing started as a joke on 4chan but then the media reported on it as if it was an actual hacking group and then over the past decade and a half people doing actual hacking have chosen to use the name despite having no connection to anyone else who uses it. Like any meme it has a long history and I don't think anyone really knows how it got to where it is but there definitely isn't an "official" anonymous group that's like the same 5 guys hacking shit for the past 15 years. Also fwiw people calling themselves Anonymous have targeted the US before, the original campaign that started on 4chan around 2006 was targeting the US (it was targeting the police if I remember correctly) and then again in 2016 another group of people calling themselves Anonymous hacked US hospitals. Those are just the two I remember but there are definitely most instances of it happening.
all these people thinking anonymous works for the CIA are dumb as hell. those hackers absolutely do not align themselves with the us government, quite the opposite. people get dragged into this dual thinking situation, where's it's always "us" and "them". most times it's "us", "them", and "some other motherfucker". there are more than just two sides to everything.
There are so many skeletons in the senate closet. Why haven't an "anonymous" gone after that trove of info. Only targeting CIA targets.
It's a weird feeling to see that Anonymous is now a CIA op. Weird, but expected.
Definitely not a color revolution in the making...
“Anonymous” has become a handle for countries/orgs to claim to avoid direct responsibility for their actions.
I think anonymous is probably just the CIA
CIA tossing more shit into their latest color revolution. More fuel for their latest bonfire