Anonymous Hijacks DOJ Website

[Kenny]

Anonymous Hijacks DOJ Website Over Aaron Swartz Suicide

Activists from the hacker collective known as Anonymous assumed control over the homepage of a Department of Justice agency this morning.

In a manifesto left on the defaced page, the group demanded reform to the American justice system and what the activists said are threats to the free flow of information.

The lengthy essay largely mirrors previous demands from Anonymous, but this time the group also cited the recent suicide of Reddit co-founder and activist Aaron Swartz as has having "crossed a line" for the group. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison on computer fraud charges.

Prosecutors said he had stolen thousands of digital scientific and academic journal articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of disseminating them for free.

Read More: Aaron Swartz' Death Fuels MIT Probe, White House Petition to Oust Prosecutor

Anonymous says Swartz was "killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win - a twisted and distorted perversion of justice - a game where the only winning move was not to play."

"There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused," it reads, also mentioning recent arrests of Anonymous associates by the FBI.

In their statement, the hackers say they targeted the homepage of the Federal Sentencing Commission for "symbolic" reasons.

The group claimed that if their demands were not met they would release a trove of embarassing internal Justice Department documents to media outlets. Anonymous named the files after Supreme Court justices and provided links to them; an attempt by CNN to follow the links yielded dead-ends, mostly offline sites.

The file names use an ".aes256? suffix, denoting a common encryption protocol. The same system was used to encrypt the Wikileaks Afghan war documents before their release.

As of press time, the commission webpage had been taken down.

:hehe: And you think YOUR puter is "SAFE"? :kickass:

Please follow out the links in the actual article to learn more about Aaron and what this is really about... Freedom of Information, it's why the web was built in the first place.


Peace,
Cy

 

[Earthian]

newser has the video here ...






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[Kenny]

newser has the video here ...






​

Once again, lofty goals, to be sure.
Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Peace,
Cy

 

[enlytend]

Sure could get interesting!

“The contents are various and we won’t ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.”

 

[south]

Anonymous re-hacks US Sentencing site into video game Asteroids

http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-re-hacks-us-sentencing-site-into-video-game-asteroids-7000010384/

 

[enlytend]

We retain full control over the site, but DNS records pulled. Like responding to burning house by removing street-signs..

I imagine working on a US .gov info security team is a very stressful and thankless job at the moment ...

There are downloads with that filename all over the place ...https://www.google.com/search?q=Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256

(probably NOT all the real one - download at your own risk ...)

 

[Kenny]

I imagine working on a US .gov info security team is a very stressful and thankless job at the moment ...

There are downloads with that filename all over the place ...https://www.google.com/search?q=Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256

(probably NOT all the real one - download at your own risk ...)

The TPB and mirror sites wont open directly for me, but there seems to be plenty of other torrent sites... imagine that.
I'm not personally into teh scene anymore, but from what I hear this is running pretty deep.

Anonymous re-hacks US Sentencing site into video game Asteroids

http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-re-hacks-us-sentencing-site-into-video-game-asteroids-7000010384/

I mean really... the Black Hats are just bitch slapping the White Hats security... how funny is that?

Like I said, you think YOUR puter is secure?


Peace,
Cy

 

[enlytend]

I didn't try to grab a copy - no point until they release the public key and if/when they do that it will all become public knowledge anyway.

I mean really... the Black Hats are just bitch slapping the White Hats security... how funny is that?

Having worked in security, I've gotta say the line between "hats" is pretty thin .

I have to wonder how many members of the collective (it's not a formal organization - anyone can declare themselves to be part of it and hop onboard) hold "white hat" day jobs? You gotta wonder. This wasn't done by script kiddies, whoever did this knows their stuff. A good "white hat" pen tester (i.e. "ethical hacker") COULD break into a lot of things ... if they chose to do so. Security-conscious corporations pay a lot of money to send their infosec personnel to take courses on pen testing (aka hacking techniques - generally taught by "former black hats") or they hire those companies to test and audit their security practices. All very legit, if used when and where you're sanctioned to do it.

Like I said, you think YOUR puter is secure?

Nothing is 100% secure. It's all about mitigating risk.

That said, Anon either found some overlooked vulnerability OR someone did a good job of social engineering their way in. Either way, not good. I feel kind of sorry for the folks on the gov security team - slapped by Anonymous, lots of 'splainin' to do for their higher-ups, subject of public ridicule, and probably taking crap from everyone who knows what they do for a living. Now that's a bad week at work!