LulzSec boss Hector Monsegur was working for us - FBI

From Technology

POLICE on two continents swooped on top members of computer hacking group LulzSec early today, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organisation's leader - who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months - arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy.
Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court.
An indictment charging the suspects, who include two men from Great Britain, two from Ireland and an American from Chicago, is expected to be unsealed today in the Southern District of New York.
"This is devastating to the organisation," an FBI official involved with the investigation said. "We're chopping off the head of LulzSec."
The offshoot of the loose network of hackers, Anonymous, believed to have caused billions of dollars in damage to governments and corporations, was allegedly led by a shadowy figure FoxNews.com has identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28.
Working under the alias "Sabu", the unemployed father of two allegedly commanded a loosely-organised, international team of thousands of hackers from his nerve centre in a public housing project on New York's Lower East Side.
After the FBI unmasked Monsegur last June, he became a cooperating witness, sources said.

Apparently this wasn't completely unexpected.

Murdoch's Sun Website Hacked

Here is how the Sun's webpage looked today thanks to hacking group Lulzsec:





Nice spoof.

LulzSec Takes Down Cia.gov

Preface to internet clampdown?

From Zerohedge

Nope. This is not an Onion headline. Go ahead. Try it out. http://www.cia.gov

Internet kill switch on in T minus 5...4...3... as full blown retaliation against all (cyber)enemies foreign and domestic hits new highs. And since no crisis can go to waste, next up is the the appointment of the propaganda Internet Tzar.

Senate Website Hacked--Again

The loosely organized hacker group Lulz Security broke into a public portion of the Senate website over the weekend and announced the hack in a tweet on Monday. Lulz, whose name derives from Internet slang for "laugh out loud," tweeted on Wednesday but has not mentioned hacking the Senate website.

Recent weeks have seen a long string of embarrassing hacks. The International Monetary Fund has been hit, as have Lockheed Martin Corp, Citigroup Inc, Google and Michaels Stores...

Anonymous Hack Brings Security Firm To Its Knees

From NPR


The hacktivist group Anonymous is at it again. This time, it has humiliated a Internet security firm that threatened to out the group's hierarchy...

...Earlier this month, HBGary Federal's CEO Aaron Barr said the company, which specializes in analyzing vulnerabilities in computer security for companies and even some government agencies, had undertaken an investigation of Anonymous and had used social media to unmask the group's most important people...

...Barr said an HBGary representative was set to give a presentation at a security conference in San Francisco, but as soon as Anonymous got wind of their plans, it hacked into HBGary's servers, riffled through their e-mails and published them to the web. The group defaced HBGary's website and published the user registration database of another site owned by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary.

Amazingly, reports ArsTechnica, Anonymous managed all this by exploiting, easy and everyday security flaws...

...Forbes reports that HBGary has become "toxic," its clients and partners cutting ties. It reports that CEO Barr also canceled the talk at the B-Sides conference, which was supposed to be about Anonymous.

Are the Cyber Battles with the Enemies of WikiLeaks the New Civil Disobedience?

From Alternet.


Are distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks a legitimate and effective form of protest?

December 13, 2010 |


The WikiLeaks controversy has opened up one of the most complicated intersections of politics and the Internet that we’ve seen in a while. One particularly interesting development has been the launch of attacks against companies and politicians perceived to be foes of WikiLeaks, by a loose group of online activists called Anonymous.

At the Personal Democracy Forum’s symposium on Wikileaks over the weekend, organizer and blogger Noel Hidalgo put forth an idea that divided the room pretty quickly: that the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience...

Breaking News: Wikileaks Hacktivists Shut Down Amazon’s European Websites

From Prison Planet.

Assange supporters make good on threat to exact revenge for website closure

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Sunday, December 12, 2010.

UPDATE: Amazon’s websites have just come back online. The down time was a good two hours. Twitter is still raging on the issue.

It appears that Wikileaks hacktivists have made good on their threat to take down one of the Internet’s global behemoths. Amazon’s European websites are down and inaccessible, costing the company untold millions on one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the run up to Christmas.
Firing the biggest salvo in what hacktivists have dubbed a new cyber-war, Wikileaks supporters have seemingly exacted revenge for Amazon removing Julian Assange’s website from its cloud network of servers at the behest of Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee ten days ago.
“Catching you up to speed, it is entirely possible that Anonymous, the 4chan-started “hacking” group could be behind the down time. The group, which has tossed attacks at MasterCard, Visa and PayPal since the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has claimed in the past that it would target Amazon. It was widely known that Wikileaks was using the Amazon DNS services, and Amazon then pulled the site from the services due to its activities,” reports TheNextWeb.
I was personally trying to buy Christmas presents at around 8pm GMT on Amazon.co.uk. The website became increasingly lethargic before it went down altogether.
Amazon’s websites in France, Germany and Italy are also all offline at time of writing, although Amazon.com is still accessible at the present time.

WikiLeaks cyberwar: hackers bring down Swedish government site

From The Telegraph.



Anonymous hackers who claim they are defending WikiLeaks brought down the Swedish government's website amid warnings they will attack again.


By Andy Bloxham 10:24AM GMT 09 Dec 2010

The official site, regeringen.se, was offline for several hours overnight and only a message saying the site could not be reached was visible.
Commercial websites including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have already been targeted by co-ordinated action on one of the busiest shopping days of the year after the firms said that they would no longer process donations to WikiLeaks.
A group calling itself Anonymous and operating under the banner "Operation Payback" was behind some of the attacks and there were concerns that Twitter could become a target because it removed Anonymous' listing.

A 22-year-old software engineer who called himself Coldblood said: "The campaign is not over, it's still going strong. More and more people are joining.
"I see this as becoming a war - but not a traditional war: this is a war of data."
He added: "We are trying to keep the internet free for everyone."
The actions so far have been essentially attacks by volume, known as DDoS or distributed denial of service, in which the target site is hit with massively increased numbers of visitors with the intention of exceeding its capabilities and forcing it to crash.
In this case, hundreds of volunteers have downloaded something called a botnet, which aids the distribution of the command to attack the site. The volunteers wait until they are given a signal on an internet chatroom, before launching the massed attack.
The attacks are illegal in Britain and carry a maximum sentence of two years.
Internet security experts warned that Amazon could be next after the firm removed WikiLeaks contents from one of its services.
Carole Theriault, a senior security consultant at Sophos, a computer security firm, said: "If the big companies weren't locking down their information before, they're definitely doing it now.
"This is really unprecedented and Amazon could be next."...

Pro-Wikileaks Vigilantes Down Visa.com

They are down. Keep kicking them.

From Wired.com

Visa and Mastercard might be competitors but they share at least two things in common – they both decided to cut off donations to Wikileaks through their services, and both of their websites have been knocked off the net in retaliation.

The group responsible is the self-named group Anonymous which has marshalled Wikileaks supporters into supporting a denial of service attack on the U.S.-based credit card companies. Visa.com stopped responding early in the afternoon Wednesday Pacific time, while Mastercard.com fell at least eight hours earlier and remains unresponsive.

Visa Down!

Take all the fkers down. Take the whole establishment down. They are going down anyway...sooner or later...and you too Lieberman you little shit. And Hillary, jump off a cliff with your sandbox partner Obama. And hey guess what all of you establishment liars....everyone hates you! Yeah that's right. Did you hear me? We all hate you lying SOBs. All you corporate scum.

From The Huffington Post.

Just hours after MasterCard's website was disabled by WikiLeaks supporters, Visa.com is now down as well....

Hackers Shut Down Mastercard In Revenge For Wikileaks

Welcome to MasterCard Worldwide....Not! Try it yourself.

These hackers are good, can we get them to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well? Force Rove and other neocons to go to jail? Turn off Obama's teleprompters? Put Lieberman on some terror list? So many wishes....mmm....what other good deeds can they do I wonder?


From The Guardian

MasterCard site partially frozen by hackers in WikiLeaks 'revenge'

'Operation: Payback' hacks into MasterCard site over payment network's decision to cease taking donations to WikiLeaks

4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline (again)

From Arstechnica

The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site's operations.

A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself "Coldblood" has said that any website that's "bowing down to government pressure" is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.

The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn't harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank's website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange's sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.

Internet War In Progress: Swiss bank that froze Assange's bank account TAKEN OFFLINE by hackers Anon_Operation; Paypal Blog Down 8 Hours By Anonymous

www.postfinance.ch taken offline by hacking group Anon_Operation as retribution for the freezing of Assange's bank account.

From Anon_Operation Twitter

PayPal hit by DDoS attack after spurning Wikileaks

From ZDnet and The Register