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FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

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Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#131

Post by drivebyacct2 »

skwirl wrote: post #94
alan_cx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you assume that the techniques used for something most would assume to be reasonable will not ever be used in less desirable ways?

Police "techniques" involve guns, tear gas, helicopters, etc. At any time the police could in theory fly to your house, launch tear gas into your windows, and shoot you in the head as you run out. And I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly worried about that happening to the point where I want to take guns, tear gas, and helicopters away from the police. This is the FBI taking down criminals engaging in a clear…

Actually no, they exploited and stole data from any user visiting any Freedom Hosted site. Get an education about what FH is rather than jumping to "save the children" to talk down to people.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#132

Post by phaus »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me more background about that. (I recall mention of this before on HN, but I'm not recalling many details.) What's our best information on how leadership of Anonymous has changed over time? AFTER EDIT: Thanks for your link, which I think came as an edit to your comment. Here is a link to follow-up news: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/22/lulzsec-sa...

Someone else should step up and give a comprehensive overview, because I can only recount the timeline from memory, not provide sources. But iirc, Anonymous was a loose coalition of random people on the internet, some of which turned out to have some basic hacking skills. They weren't really taken seriously until they embarrassed HBGary. At that point, the FBI began investigating them. Anonymous changed their name to…

LulzSec was not Anonymous. While some of its membership may have overlapped, that doesn't really mean anything, because anyone can be a part of Anonymous, simply by carrying out acts in the group's name.

Sabu forgot to activate TOR before logging into IRC just a single time, and the FBI was able to locate him. Sabu was the legal guardian of his siblings, and was pretty much told that he would never see them again if he didn't cooperate with the feds. And so Sabu became a mole for the FBI, spending the next several months trying to elicit identifiable information from his own crew. For the most part, it worked.

What's interesting is that at least one of his fellow hackers is already out of prison, and the rest are going to be out in a few years. Sabu on the other hand, being a United States citizen, faces much harsher penalties than his European counterparts even though he was the only one with a deal. If I had to guess, best case scenario he is going to be sentenced to 10 years. To be honest though, I wouldn't be surprised if he got a few decades more.

Also, Sabu didn't have to manipulate Anonymous into attacking CP networks. It's something that they do on a semi-regular basis. They did it before Sabu, and they are doing it now.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#133

Post by drivebyacct2 »

dthunt wrote: post #117

Why are MAC's persistent? They're totally insecure, so you can't make sensible security decisions off of them. Why aren't they randomly assigned on power-up?

Lots of networking gear and applications make a lot of assumptions that MAC addresses are static and persistent. Things would certainly break if this contract were broken at this stage.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#134

Post by phaus »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #78
kens wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The FBI used standard police techniques to infiltrate and eventually dismantle the those groups. Seriously, how do we know the FBI's story isn't "parallel construction"? It always seemed to me that tracking down Anonymous would be easy if you had NSA-scale monitoring. I don't want to sound like paranoid guy, but maybe the FBI's stories about tracking down clues from chat logs are all made up.

I don't think it sounds paranoid. I think it's at least plausible. I only recently learned about parallel construction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Basically, the NSA is suspected to cooperate with other arms of the government, such as the DEA. The NSA supposedly provides information about who is involved in what illegal activity. Apparently this information is provided illegally, without a war…

I'll look for the article, but as I mentioned above, the way I understand it is that he logged into IRC without using TOR or a VPN one time and they got him.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#135

Post by krapp »

devx wrote: post #104
sliverstorm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original idea of a "tinfoil hatter" was that the "hatter" wore a head garment made of tinfoil, to block the mind-control radio waves the [government|aliens] were using to take over people's brains. I don't think we have any particular indication that is likely, yet.

Well, we're probably just a few short decades away from us being able to influence things around us (and possibly even animals) with mind control. At that point you'd have to believe the government would be already working on ways to get into people's heads.

If anything, you'd have to be be insane not to believe in government mind-control rays.

Or else, you're one of them.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#136

Post by pyre »

OWaz wrote: post #124
pnathan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even know anymore. We're gonna have to raise the bar on what it means to be a "tinfoil hatter"; the original definition has become reality. That's sort of where I've gotten to this summer. It's really frustrating and saddening. Although mind-control waves still aren't, TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE, a thing.

Too often people forget that propaganda machines (media outlets) and biased education materials significantly shape the perspective people have of the world. That's the kind of 'mind control' which matters.

Unfortunately, nothing as simple as a tinfoil hat can block this though.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#137

Post by a3n »

baddox wrote: post #111
zanny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainstream media bombardment and constant advertising harassment do a pretty good job of mind control, though. Also, culture is the best mind control. Raise people with a mind set the way you want it and you never have to do anything directly, because they already are siding with you even through cognative dissonance.

Public schools are far more significant than the media.

You could be right. Or it could be the exact opposite. Or something else. It doesn't matter. Fundamentally we do it to ourselves, because we're herd/pack/social animals. We shun anyone too different from the tribe, it's in our DNA. Because of that, we are highly evolved to fit in.

Yeah, we're self aware and all that, we have choices, but what we generally choose to do is identify with some group and hate opposing groups. It's what we do.

The chimpanzees are laughing at us.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#138

Post by pkinsky »

belorn wrote: post #125

The use of malware in police enforcement is truly a unique event in society. At what other point in history has police distributed a completly illegal tool onto unsuspected and non-targeted civilians? It feels like a total unexplored area of liability laws, so I look with excitement to when the first lawsuit starts. Some people have compared malware with guns. This is to me a very bad comparison, since guns actually…

The government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#139

Post by sillysaurus2 »

phaus wrote: post #132
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else should step up and give a comprehensive overview, because I can only recount the timeline from memory, not provide sources. But iirc, Anonymous was a loose coalition of random people on the internet, some of which turned out to have some basic hacking skills. They weren't really taken seriously until they embarrassed HBGary. At that point, the FBI began investigating them. Anonymous changed their name to…

LulzSec was not Anonymous. While some of its membership may have overlapped, that doesn't really mean anything, because anyone can be a part of Anonymous, simply by carrying out acts in the group's name. Sabu forgot to activate TOR before logging into IRC just a single time, and the FBI was able to locate him. Sabu was the legal guardian of his siblings, and was pretty much told that he would never see them again if…

If I had to guess, best case scenario he is going to be sentenced to 10 years.

Ten years? Even with a deal? Really?

That's astonishing if accurate.

Re: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

#140

Post by DigitalSea »

What is happening to this world? The Government and it's so-called agencies vested with protecting America and its allies are treating everyone like criminals, privately harvesting our information via any means possible.

They don't even have to hide it any more. They can admit things like this and nobody can do anything about it. We've passed the point of being able to defend ourselves against actions like this. Every step we take to protect our privacy, the Government is presumably two-steps ahead.

We just can't win...

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