Anonymous hackers re-emerge amid US unrest | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous hackers re-emerge amid US unrest

bbc.com

28 pointsheadalgorithm28 comments

Relevant post by Troy Hunt which debunks the claim that Anonymous "hacked" the Minneapolis Police Department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382427

Hacking attribution in the US is a total crap show. Really it's terrible. I have no idea why we ever trust government attribution.

For example, the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank": a hacked payment TOS in the lobby sending spam. You can't make it up, it's really is this dumb.

How about the attribution of the DNC "hack" in light of Crowdstrike's declassified congressional testimony? Is there a reason nobody from our government has asked Assange? I mean, he's been pretty easy to find.

It's not clear if you're missing some context. Nobody mentioned the government, and Troy Hunt is the owner of Have I Been Pwned - he's pretty authoritative and trustworthy when it comes to breaches, mainly because he has the largest dataset (as far as I am aware) of known breached accounts, so can connect dots that others cannot.

For those interested (or thinking a citation is needed), here is a summary from Snopes:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...

They conclude that the claim of the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank" is "Unproven", as of 2017 at least:

"In March 2017, CNN reported that the issue was still under investigation by the FBI, but nothing substantive had yet been turned up"

Since most of hacker news is technically advanced, I'd encourage you all to take a look at the data and determine exactly "what" the back channel was (maybe a secret IRC server??).

First you have to find it, since it's buried in MSM reports and "maaaaybe it's true but who knows??" articles.

Can you elaborate, regarding your last paragraph?

The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump. This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses."

But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!

Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? Even if they offered some sort of deal involving immunity from US prosecution, it's unlikely that Assange would have had any proof that the source of the emails was the Russian government. (Also, incriminating the Russian government in a crime can have negative effects on your life expectancy).

As for your statistics, it's worth noting that Mueller's investigation probably made a profit by uncovering millions of dollars worth of tax fraud[0], and it lead to indictments of or guilty pleas from 34 people and 3 companies.[1] That doesn't seem like it was a complete waste of time or money.

[0] https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigati...

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...

> Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI?

I'm just wondering why they never bothered to ask? I mean, he committed the crime, why not interview him?

What crime did he commit?

I was speaking figuratively, since they were an investigation and Assange is the one who ran wikileaks when they released the DNC/Podesta emails.

No laws were broken by publishing the DNC/Podesta emails. It is not illegal to embarrass politicians by exposing their corruption.

The fact of him being investigated, also, is not evidence of guilt. So speaking figuratively is actually counter-productive to understanding the situation with regards to Wikileaks exposure of US government crimes against humanity.

>The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump.

Yes. And as far as I know this is generally not really disputed by experts nowadays, no?

>This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses."

Yes.

>But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!

I'd be pretty surprised if US or US-aligned law enforcement or intelligence didn't try to ask him about it, if they were able to. I'm not sure if they would legally be able to while he was protected by the Ecuadorian embassy, though.

Regardless, of course Russian intelligence isn't going to tell Assange "hey, Russian intelligence here, here's some emails". Assange would just repeat what we all already know: someone using the name Guccifer 2.0 supplied him with the emails. Beyond that, he knows nothing about who may be behind that identity. Why would he and how could he?

And as another commenter said: he could just refuse to say anything at all. "Wikileaks doesn't reveal any information about our sources."

Either way, he's not really the source of truth on this issue. He was the broker that helped distribute the emails; there's no reason why he would know anything about the true identity of the culprits, or even if the person who emailed him was actually the culprit and not just a different broker in the chain, etc.

Quote:

"What we almost certainly have here is the result of someone selecting every http://ci.minneapolis.mn.us email address from old breaches or credential stuffing lists and passing it off as something it isn't. There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest this is legitimate."

>>"hacktivist" group Anonymous has returned from the shadows.

>>the group has targeted groups over race relations in the past.

>>The "hacktivist" collective has no face, and no leadership. Its tagline is simply "we are legion", referring to its allegedly large numbers of individuals.

A decade later and the media still doesn't understand anonymous. It never is a group. It is mask, a word, used by any number of different groups at different times. One should never ascribe any group identity to anonymous, no more than one would group individuals who choose to wear a particular color of hat.

Yes the article attempting to determine if this had the signature of something "genuinely" anonymous demonstrates a clear void of space between the author and the point. An attack is a genuinely anonymous if it is anonymous and uses certain imagery. Clearly, the video and the UN hack are anonymous. Whether or not the police website going down was from them or not, who knows.

Whether the anonymous attack was perpetrated by American acktivists or whether it was perpetrated by state actors is a different question. But there's no point asking "is it genuinely anonymous"; rather, ask "was it genuinely instate disaffection or is it concocted interstate action". (They don't ask that question. They don't get close. But the only questions worth asking are this one and "who did it".)

I agree, but one friendly nit-pick: capitalized "Anonymous" is the hacktivist thing, and lower-case "anonymous" is the ordinary adjective. People acting as Anonymous are also anonymous, but not everyone acting anonymously is Anonymous.

Journalists do apply the same mistaken conceptualization to "black bloc" tactics employed by individuals dressing in black and carrying big black umbrellas.

It's not a single homogeneous, coordinated/regimented organization or even an irregular gang affiliation. It's an equipment choice. Yet we have people writing about "the black bloc" doing this or that, as if that were informative.

It's strange how easily corporate media outlets can be short-circuiuted and subverted to produce an almost robotic, knee-jerk reflex, when attempting to cover a story.

It's not even Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's more akin to a kindergartner explaining fidget spinners to grandma.

Not to mention another certain collective identity recently tellingly condemned as a terror organization on twitter.

This collective is a little different given that it consists of multiple groups organizing and coordinating long term planning among nationally networks.

Completely different from a bunch of script kiddies on 4chan getting together Friday night and ddosing for the lulz, or any subsequent incarnations that are true to the ephemeral spirit of anonymous.

Also very different in that most of 4chan is right-wing or far-right nowadays, largely due to /pol/. Most of the site's posters are supportive of the police in this instance, and sees the response and civil unrest as "anti-white rhetoric and violence perpetrated by liberals and black people". Many believe Floyd deserved to be killed.

(There are still some more moderate and reasonable bastions in some boards, but most boards are thoroughly infected by /pol/.)

"Anonymous" has been disconnected from its origins for well over a decade now.

>Also very different in that most of 4chan is right-wing or far-right nowadays, largely due to /pol/. Most of the site's posters are supportive of the police in this instance, and sees the response and civil unrest as "anti-white rhetoric and violence perpetrated by liberals and black people". Many believe Floyd deserved to be killed.

This isn't quite right. 4chan is more right leaning than almost any other place online (save for voat and 8chan among others), but all political views are expressed on 4chan. You may get shouted down but you won't get banned for saying almost anything. The trouble is that "right wing" ideas are overexpressed on 4chan because these people are being totally deplatformed everywhere else.

This is dangerous because when you silence one of a two party system, you're actually silencing a range of ideologies that aren't "left leaning enough" and create an illusion of consensus, when in reality you are forcing thousands of political dimensions, and millions of people, into two generic boxes. I think part of the alleged rise of "white supremacy" is actually a response to being forced into the conservative box and dehumanized with accusations of Nazism and such.

It's in their interest not to understand it because the story is much more appealing and cinematic this way.

I don't really buy the idea that Anonymous were not a group to begin with. They had to have some organization in the beginning coordinating things and developing their marketing strategy. And regardless of the fact, if it even is a fact, that it is just a name applied to any number of possibly unconnected groups it is still a label that describes a group of people. A swarm of bees is a swarm of bees no matter which bees are present.

Anonymous: A sloppy group of script kiddies that only have the power to terrorize children on Ring cameras and vandalize decades old websites that nobody cares about.

The irony is that since since they claim they are all the same, we can blame everyone in the group for the actions of a few.

> But generally, they are activists, taking aim at those they accuse of misusing power. They do so in very public ways, such as hijacking websites or forcing them offline.

Not sure about that.

When you're an activist, everyone else looks like an activist too. This is one of the problems with journalists who take sides: activist journalists see everything as a struggle and are incapable of even recognizing trolling.

Hard to believe BBC gave a green light to this column considering the recent publishing's have been public knowledge, including the so-called hack. Twitter has become a disease in the last few months and most of this stuff originates from there.

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