Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

bgr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#31

Post by CrownStem »

espeed wrote: post #24
CrownStem wrote: post #13

I cannot think of a better way for this group to hurt their cause and garner the animosity of much of the world. It seems to endlessly repeat throughout history- groups with an axe to grind (whether in power or rebelling against it) use blunt force to try and further their cause. They're either too lazy or not competent enough to use a scalpel so they blow up the patient to get rid of a tumor. After the majority of t…

Or it's an opposing group using its name to discredit it.

That could be true, but I believe it to be unlikely in this case.

It's easier to benefit from a false-flag attack by just doing it- denials don't carry as much weight in an emotional, post-attack context. When forewarning is given for a false-flag, you give the accused a chance to back away and say "it's not us" before an event, lodging enough doubt that the size of the crowd with torches and pitchforks isn't as big afterwards... I think this would be counter-productive for the guys staging the false-flag attack.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#32

Post by [deleted] »

espeed wrote: post #24
CrownStem wrote: post #13

I cannot think of a better way for this group to hurt their cause and garner the animosity of much of the world. It seems to endlessly repeat throughout history- groups with an axe to grind (whether in power or rebelling against it) use blunt force to try and further their cause. They're either too lazy or not competent enough to use a scalpel so they blow up the patient to get rid of a tumor. After the majority of t…

Or it's an opposing group using its name to discredit it.

[deleted]

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#33

Post by CrownStem »

CrownStem wrote: post #31
espeed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's an opposing group using its name to discredit it.

That could be true, but I believe it to be unlikely in this case. It's easier to benefit from a false-flag attack by just doing it- denials don't carry as much weight in an emotional, post-attack context. When forewarning is given for a false-flag, you give the accused a chance to back away and say "it's not us" before an event, lodging enough doubt that the size of the crowd with torches and pitchforks isn't as big…

Looking at your idea from a different angle: I guess it could be useful for an opposing group to make the threat, in order to make Anonymous look impotent if it's not carried out, while the opposing group takes credit for "stopping" it.

Who knows... -We- surely don't. I feel like I'm outlining a plot for a Tom Clancy novel.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#34

Post by almost_usual »

shenberg wrote: post #12

Why attack DNS? BGP is more vulnerable and receives less scrutiny (remember Pakistan bringing youtube down for the entire world via a misconfigured censorship attempt?). Go look at the references from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking for some horror stories.

You could at least attack some of the major ASes.

http://www.routeviews.org/

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#35

Post by marcamillion »

nextparadigms wrote: post #17

At this point I think it's just FBI/CIA trying to troll us and get more cyber-laws passed.

As cynical as this point sounds, you may be on to something. We know that the FBI infiltrated LulzSec...so who knows if this may be something they are doing.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#36

Post by astrodust »

philip1209 wrote: post #25

How much redundancy is built into the GMail nameservers? That worries me more than http requests. Also, should I host my own nameservers and assume I'll fly under the radar of attacks?

This is allegedly targeted at the root servers. It doesn't matter what DNS provider you use if your TLD is offline.

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#37

Post by minimax »

tomjen3 wrote: post #21
knieveltech wrote: post #19

Has anyone besides RTM ever successfully dropped the majority of the network?

The name escapes me for the moment, but there was a famous computer virus which I believe did almost to do that. They key wasn't that it was particularly clever and the attack vector it used had been patched by MS months before. The key was that the attack happened over UDP which meant that there was no handshake, no congestion control, no need to worry about dropped packets, etc. The only limitation was the bandwidt…

You're talking about SQL Slammer. The whole virus fit in a single UDP packet. Wired had a pretty good (if slightly sensational) writeup at the time:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/slammer.html

Re: 'Anonymous' hackers plan to shut down the Internet this Saturday

#39

Post by rbanffy »

marcamillion wrote: post #35
nextparadigms wrote: post #17

At this point I think it's just FBI/CIA trying to troll us and get more cyber-laws passed.

As cynical as this point sounds, you may be on to something. We know that the FBI infiltrated LulzSec...so who knows if this may be something they are doing.

As godwinesque as this may sound, this wouldn't be the first time group A does something bad just to be able to blame group B in order to receive the powers it craves.
Post reply on HN