Web Attackers Point to Cause in WikiLeaks
Alfredo Estrella/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A banner in Mexico City displayed a portrait of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and the words “We are all Assange,” at a news conference on Thursday for the unveiling of a plaque in his support.
By NOAM COHEN
Published: December 9, 2010
They got their start years ago as cyberpranksters, an online community of tech-savvy kids more interested in making mischief than political statements.
State’s Secrets
Articles in this series examine American diplomatic cables as a window on relations with the rest of the world in an age of war and terrorism.
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The Lede Blog: Attacks on MasterCard and PayPal Sites to Avenge WikiLeaks Are 'Operation Payback' (December 8, 2010)
The Lede Blog: ‘Operation Payback’ Attacks Visa (December 8, 2010)
ROOM FOR DEBATE
Can WikiLeaks Be Duplicated?
Will others succeed in flooding the world with spilled secrets?
Post a CommentBut the coordinated attacks on major corporate and government Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, which began on Wednesday and continued on Thursday, suggested that the loosely organized group called Anonymous might have come of age, evolving into one focused on more serious matters: in this case, the definition of Internet freedom.
While the attacks on such behemoths as MasterCard, Visa and PayPal were not nearly as sophisticated as some less publicized assaults, they were a step forward in the group’s larger battle against what it sees as increasing control of the Internet by corporations and governments. This week they found a cause and an icon: Julian Assange, the former hacker who founded WikiLeaks and is now in a London jail at the request of the Swedish authorities investigating him on accusations of rape.
“This is kind of the shot heard round the world — this is Lexington,” said John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that advocates for a freer Internet.
On Thursday, the police in the Netherlands took the first official action against the campaign, detaining a 16-year-old student in his parents’ home in The Hague who they said admitted to participating in attacks on MasterCard and Visa. The precise nature of his involvement was unclear, but in past investigations, the authorities have sometimes arrested those unsophisticated enough not to cover their tracks on the Web.
Meanwhile, a lawyer for Mr. Assange, 39, said he strongly denied that he had encouraged any attacks on behalf of WikiLeaks.
“It is absolutely false,” the lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in London on Thursday. “He did not make any such instruction, and indeed he sees that as a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations” with “WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher.”
Although Anonymous remains shadowy and without public leaders, it developed a loose hierarchy in recent years as it took on groups as diverse as the Church of Scientology and the Motion Picture Association of America.
The coordination and the tactics developed in those campaigns appeared to make this week’s attacks more powerful, allowing what analysts believe is a small group to enlist thousands of activists to bombard Web sites with traffic, making them at least temporarily inaccessible. Experts say the group appears to have used more sophisticated software this time that allowed supporters to repeatedly visit the sites at a specific time when the command was given.
The Twitter account identified with the Anonymous movement contained messages with little more than the words “Fire now.”
The attacks thus far have been of limited effect, shutting down the MasterCard Web site, not its online transactions.
But to security experts and people who have tracked or participated in the Anonymous movement, they indicated a step forward for cyberanarchists railing against the “elites” — corporations and governments with power over both the machinery and, critics increasingly argue, the content on the Web.
“In the past, Anonymous made quite a lot of noise but did little damage,” said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, a California-based security technology company. “It’s different this time around. They are starting to use the same tools that industrial hackers are using.”
Despite the name, Anonymous can be found in many locations and formats. Members converse in online forums and chat rooms where friendships and alliances often build.
“It’s the first place I go when I turn on my computer,” said one Anonymous activist, reached on an online chat service, who did not want to be named discussing the structure of the organization.
Groups of these friends, who form new conversations, or threads, sometimes decide on a topic or an issue that they feel is deserving of more attention, the activist said.
“You post things, discuss ideas and that leads to putting out a video or a document” for a campaign. In the case of WikiLeaks, the activist said, it appears that two groups decided almost simultaneously to mount a concerted effort against the site’s enemies.
“I got e-mailed these two links on Sunday or Monday,” he said. Denouncing “what’s being done to Julian and WikiLeaks,” he said, he decided to join in.
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