How Anonymous released Operation Payback

A cyber battle offensive called Operation Payback, released by a hacker team called "Anonymous," is targeting companies who have taken action in opposition to WikiLeaks. Operation Payback attacked MasterCard and Visa sites Wed. Their transgression was to halt processing of donations WikiLeaks had been accepting through those sites. Anonymous launched Operation Payback by recruiting an army of proponents who sign up for a voluntary botnet that shuts down sites by overwhelming their servers.

A huge amount of Distributed denial of service with Operation payback hacktivism

Hacktivism is what is happening with Operation Payback. There are a lot of attacks with distributed denial of service, or DDoS. The hacker team Anonymous is inviting any person with a computer and a Web connection to become “hacktivists” by offering a free download of an assault tool called LOIC. Installing the LOIC attack tool links a computer to a voluntary botnet that saturates targeted sites with a flood of information. Thurs morning it was noted that the LOIC had already been downloaded too often. Over 31,000 downloads occurred. Wednesday sites for MasterCard and Visa were shut down by DDoS attacks launched by the LOIC botnet. “MasterCard is an evil puppet of the United States government," is what Anonymous hacktivists changed the MasterCard Wikipedia entry to say.

Anonymous defends WikiLeaks

Anonymous achieved notoriety with previous Distributed denial of service attacks on targets such as the Church of Scientology, Gene Simmons of KISS and law firms suing music and video pirates. About 1,000 mirror sites where WikiLeaks copies can be found were created by Anonymous along with releasing the LOIC attack tool. Also, the hacktivist team put the content from WikiLeaks on "dark net." This is where information could be accessed however not traced because of heavily encrypted layers of web. The next target for Anonymous is rumored to be Amazon.com, which pulled WikiLeaks off its United States servers last week at the request of the federal govt.

Enduring to be an anonymous foe to attack

It does not cost anything and is easy to launch attacks like Operation Payback. Defending against Distributed denial of service attacks is expensive though. It is not easy either. As much as $10,000 a month for cyber security systems that will stop them are what big companies will pay. There have been less than 10 gigabits per second of information with the Operation Payback attacks which is said to be quite small for cyber security. The computers that the assault comes from are rotated by Anonymous regularly so it is harder to defend in opposition to it. Many of Operation Payback sites were really shut down themselves Wed because of a counterattack.

Data from

NPR

marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/12/08/pm-hacktivism-can-be-pricey-for-businesses/

ABC News

abcnews.go.com/US/operation-payback-anonymous-cyber-battle-erupts-wikileaks/story?id=12351428

BBC News

bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11957367