Say what you will about Wikileaks, but the beleaguered website featuring classified document leaks is inspiring a lot of people, for good or ill. A cyberattack forced Wikileaks to move its servers underground; now, a second group of cyber warriors is rising to Wikileaks’ defense. Dubbed Operation Payback, the hacktivists are willing surrendering their computers over to botnet software to carry out organized attacks on those who have attacked or abandoned Wikileaks, including PayPal and the Swiss bank that froze Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s bank account. (I imagine Amazon is also on that list.)
A group of hackers is nothing new, but a group of hackers donating their computers to start a direct denial of service (DDOS) attack is something unprecedented. Would you volunteer to accept a computer virus into your system? I know I wouldn’t!
“Operation Payback’s goal is not hacking for profit. In the classical external hacker case we see hackers grab information from wherever they can and monetize on it. In this case though, the hackers’ goal is to cripple a service, disrupt services, protest their cause and cause humiliation. In fact, what we see here is a very focused attack – knocking the servers offline due to so-called ‘hacker injustice’,” said Noa Bar Yossef, senior security strategist for Imperva. “In this case however, the Operation Payback is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download the piece of code, the DDoSing malware itself, that upon wake-up call the computer engages in the DoS. There is no victimized machine as the participants knowingly engage in what they call an act of defiance.”
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