Anonymous hacks Panda Security in response to LulzSec arrests
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
I don't understand why Panda lets one of his employee behave like this. He looks emotionally involved. He's making those hacker's efforts more visible.
And when it comes to anon, taunting them is quite possibly the dumbest fucking thing you can do. They're just feeding the fire and possibly getting further attacks set up.
Don't feed the troll!
Anon's justifying their activity with good cause motives doesn't make sense. There are many other ways to act efficiently in favor of these good causes without using dark forces. These strategies have already been proven to be very effective. Consider Martin Luther King, Gandi, Mandela. One single man managed to push empires and systems on their knees and surrender. These people didn't use their fists, weapons or bombs and certainly didn't leverage their cause by terror on harming or killing innocent people.
My impression is that Anons are people who by their skills manage to take control of computers and have, by this, gained power to harm. There is a very thin and fuzzy line between getting control of things (neutral) and acting to harm and justifying it by a good cause.
The feeling one may have when getting such power in our hands make it very easy to fall on the dark force side. The good cause justifications are just tactics to neutralize their own consciousness. The more people they manage to convince by it, the stronger the muzzling of their own consciousness become.
If you take 5 minutes to think about it, you'll understand that there is not much difference with terrorist's rationale. The degree of harm is of course not comparable, but it is the same logical mechanism in play and which is obviously wrong in many ways. It has been proven to be a dead end for terrorists as well as for country leaders. It is just a matter of time.
If someone has truly the desire to act to make this world a better place and contribute to make change what has to change, then there are many more efficient methods that don't require to use dark forces. One of the thing that makes them more efficient is just because of that, they don't use dark force.
The incumbent powers (gov't, companies working for them, etc), have defined a set of rules stating "this stuff is not for you to know, besides we are only doing good, so trust us", but there are acts by them that sure look a lot like abuse of their power, but they don't bother to justify them. They keep stuff secret and carry on despite concerns. So a group of people comes along and decides not to honor the rules about secrecy and instead makes effort to bring information about the questionable actions to light. The civil disobedience here is simply not honoring the rules about secrecy. There is no violence, no one is harmed physically by these acts. There may be financial harm done (almost certainly actually), I am going to agree with that, however defer discussion for a bit.
Let's look at classic passive resistance movements for a moment. They work largely by gatherings of people in demonstration of solidarity, combined with acts of civil disobedience. The rules in place are ignored intentionally, with no physical harm brought by the demonstrators. However, financial harm is a frequent result of this. Sometimes it is just a side effect, such as disruptions of business via protests, or less productivity due to people not working. Other times however, this is an intentional consequence. Yes, MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela all caused intentional financial harm to their opponents. They organized general strikes - preventing business from producing goods and making money. They organized boycotts (denying business revenue). They intentionally arranged demonstrations to cause mass disruption.
So is the financial harm caused by hacktivism terribly different from that caused by other passive resistance? Probably not for the most part. There is the fact that hacking can also be looked at as a form of sabotage - hence my comments on similarity rather than congruence. However sabotage is not black and white... other forms of sabotage which are considered OK in passive resistance movements include work slowdowns, poor quality control, and so on. This is a bit I need to think on more, but I don't feel it throws a wrench into my argument ( :) ).
Finally a big component of many passive resistance movements is publicly outing those who work against them. This may not be organized by the central organizers, but it happens, and is considered a big driving force of the movements. Think about the anti-Vietnam protests and the investigative journalism which fueled them (e.g. the pentagon papers). These information leakages are always protested by the incumbents with the same cries of "harm" and "danger" and "secret violation".
All that said, I must disclaim here: I am not taking a stance on the actions or politics of Anonymous or Lulzsec. Just pointing out that on a "passive resistance - terrorism" scale, hacktivism is still pretty left of the middle ground.
Regarding Anonymous and Lulzsec one could add that we should avoid the mistake to consider them as an homogeneous group of people in term of ideology, motives and actions. As you say, things are not black and white. My use of "black force" concept is misleading.
The fact that a guy actually named "Dotcom" is public enemy #1 to the old elites, prehaps we are in the midst of some 90s Neal Stephenson whimsy :)
Some interesting data on there...
Si prefieres LogMeIn Free: https://secure.logmein.com/ Login: PSISuport@pandasecurity.com Contraseña: panda01
...
El login de Windows, puedes usar cualquiera de los nuestros Usuario: nombre.apellido Password: Panda12345
Secure? Not so much.
As big as this might be for Anon I'm afraid they must've just guessed at passwords if that is the form of password security they used.
The root passwords were more secure but I'm willing to bet that the Windows logon(s) provided above had a file somewhere (Desktop perhaps) with the passwords in plain view. PasswordSafe or the like may have been used but chances are it had a password of similar strength to those above.
It's all about signaling unless you are seriously genuinely interested in improving humanity's lot, not just feeling good for doing something good. (One way to test that is to do anonymously random act of kindness without being recongnized by the public or anyone)
But yeah, this backlash is pretty childish on both ends.
ZING! haha
Seriously, these 'hackers' could be contributing to the greater good of our civilization by writing tools and methodologies to make network security not so asymmetric in favor of attackers. It's really a shame that they don't see they are hurting real people and doing real damage.
However, I'm not feeling too bad about it. I'm disgusted at the US government bankrupting itself partly by enriching its revolving-door cronies in the security industrial complex [1][2], who in turn give us security theater in order to justify the government bankrupting itself partly by enriching its cronies... ad infinitum.
And the casualties are our rights and civil liberties and ultimately a potential currency-centered financial crisis that could make 2007/2008 look like spilled milk. What's going on is not sustainable in any way, shape, or form, and cannot end well. If Anonymous, Wikileaks, or anyone else helps shine light on this insanity before its too late, even if they have to be a little naughty but not truly evil to do so, then more power to them.
sigh
Anon, I love you, but I hate you sometimes.
Anyways, It will be interesting to see if Anonymous can actually survive the recent Fed strike. Without some sort of a leadership, Anon will descend into chaos due to infighting.
The signs are there even in this attack. Have a look at the press release. Typically, Anonymous press releases are written in hyperbolic, but grammatically correct English. This one seems to written be written by a shabby teenager.
The feds have arrested five individuals associated with Anonymous. Anonymous struck back, albeit in a somewhat childish way, reminding me of the KFC bombing in Jakarta in response to ABB's trial (not well planned, ad hoc attack which was both visible and largely ineffective at causing real damage).
Will Anonymous be able to recover, and carry out other high profile hactivism attacks? Or will they degenerate into more of what we see here?
I am not trying to draw moral equivalencies here. However, it seems that when looking at social positions relative to law enforcement, that's the closest parallel that comes to my mind at least in my experience.
According to the article, Anon claimed Panda Sec helped jail 25 anons. How is that childish, purely from target perspective? It's either Law Enforcers, or their affiliates.
Well - like it or not that's how it comes across and I personally find your comparison extremely distasteful.