LulzSec takes down cia.gov | Hacker News Reader

LulzSec takes down cia.gov

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14 pointspistacchio6 comments

I have a couple of speculative questions and I wonder if anybody could help answer them: (a) assuming governments attempt to use these recent events politically to get legislation that gives them 'control' over the internet, will they be able to stop DDoS' and hacks resulting from poor security in organisations, or in the formers case a lack of caching/bandwidth, (b) if they are using Tor, not giving away their personal information, and using a botnet, how traceable are they? -- Will there be a money trail from the botnet owner or is this impossible to find out, (c) if, instead of a couple of bored teenagers, the hackers were experienced professionals could more damage be caused to sites with higher security -- is this already going on?

I'll try to reply:

(a) I doubt, but I don't really have an answer so I'll skip

(b) I think VPNing out from Tor and ride a botnet will make you pretty much untraceable. It would be really hard to find you because of both technological and legislational barriers (where is your VPN? and the bots? Qatar? Good luck). Following the money trail would be a more reasonable way but still electronic currencies are hard to trace (LibertyReserve, and so on) due to foreign legislations and in the end they could always have funded themselves from stolen credit cards (a quick search on pastebin and you can buy some for yourself fresh from skimmers). And not talking about bitcoin.

I know it wouldn't actually put a stop to what they are doing, but am I the only one puzzled that the US Government hasn't (afaik) done anything visible, such as seizing their .com domain, or asking/forcing Twitter to delete their account?

Funny but interesting, there are only 2k websites more popular than cia.gov in the UAE:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cia.gov

This...this is getting out of hand.

Is every website really this vulnerable to DDoS?

In general, yes - especially if those sites are not immediately revenue generating.

The kind of infrastructure you need to defend against humungous DDOS attacks does not come cheaply, whether bought or outsourced.

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