LulzSec opens hack request line | Hacker News Reader

LulzSec opens hack request line

bbc.co.uk

20 pointswhiskers23 comments

Hi. It's Iain from the BBC here. I wrote the piece. I took your comments on board and changed the line about DDoS leaving sites more open to attack.

The story now states that we don't know if Lulz went beyond a DDoS and took other info from the servers.

Cheers

Kudos for reaching out here.

Would you be up for doing a Q&A sometime about how you guys go about business?

Of course. If anyone wants to get in contact, share thoughts, feedback on stories, I'm on iain.mackenzie@bbc.co.uk Just like Points of View, I can't promise to reply to everything... but I'll always take a look and happy to do Q&A.

How about http://www.reddit.com/r/iama ?

Are we now directing people towards reddit? HN works fine, methinks.

What's wrong with that? Reddit provides better platform for QA.

HN has better signal to noise, and the guy's already here

What exactly is Lulzsec protesting?

The set up seems sort of similar to how a mind reading magician might do his work- take thousands of phone call requests, do as you please, and claim to have responded to requests and not just whatever you're able to break into. This might make it seem as if you're able to break into anything at whim and not select, relatively unsecure networks.

"When a site is brought down, it is often vulnerable to further security breaches."

what? I'd say it's just the other way around

Slowing things down can really help if you're trying to exploit a race condition. But yes, usually not.

EVE Online, Minecraft, Escapist magazine ... what was the point again? I thought at first they had a moral motive.

Anyway, DDOSing is not hacking and at least with these harmless kiddie attacks the defense mechanisms will be more readily available and cheaper (due to higher demand).

You may be confusing them with some of the Anonymous attacks from earlier this year. Lulzsec has claimed nothing but "doing it for the lulz" i.e., no real reason at all other than to do it. Anon has claimed to do some hacks for moral reasons.

Right. The article claims they're doing it on moral grounds though.

From a comment I posted yesterday re bringing down gaming sites:

"For those wondering what the motivation was, earlier in the day there was a thread on the gaming site Escapist complaining about LulzSec hacking into Brink.

So LulzSec decided to take down that site and what I assume were a bunch of other easy gaming targets."

>I thought at first they had a moral motive.

They never had a moral motive. When they targeted Sony, everyone was singing praise, but they have never claimed to be doing this for anything other than "lulz".

Someone made a great comment on a previous Lulzsec headline: When they're attacking Sony it's "righteous" and "good", when they're attacking companies we like they're "bad" and "immature".

Whenever they're hacking anyone and making headlines, they're increasing political pressures to create a "civilized" internet in the name of safety and security.

This keeps getting regurgitated on a daily basis, and I don't think the people saying it are even aware of the disruption on a person's daily life that results from this.

I'll agree that as a whole security on the net is lousy, but drastic measures like this are an equally lousy method of dealing with it. No one should be surprised when laws get passed that limit freedoms on the internet in response to these actions. Cause and effect.

I agree with you that any security implementation will hurt the web and can be a very dangerous thing that will likely fail.

My statement is a fact. Politicians and large corporations WILL use incidents like these to push their legislation forward.

I just realized that I'm agreeing with you and COMPLETELY misread your comment earlier. I apologize

Or: the gatekeepers are just as vulnerable as anyone else, so maybe we shouldn't give them the key.

Reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657127

Can we request that they attack the Chinese who are are systematically attacking US 'digital assets'?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com