Q&A with hackers who say they helped break into Sony’s network | Hacker News Reader

Q&A with hackers who say they helped break into Sony’s network

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsjaoued16 comments

Reading this was painful as hell. They constantly contradict themselves and it makes it quite obvious that they're acting completely spontaneously. It's also pretty clear that based on how they act in public and in interviews, that they're not smart enough to cover their tracks properly and I would put money on them getting caught soon because of it.

> I believe we currently control almost 50% of overall Tor network and over 70% of exit nodes.

This was one of the technical misunderstanding that was made during that "attack", as it assumed all nodes were treated equally. In contrast, the tor network look at attributes such as up-time in order to shape and redirect traffic flows for improved performance. When the network is increased by 70% from newly created nodes, those new nodes only get a small portion of the overall traffic until they have had time to established themselves.

They do say later in the interview that they could had added the nodes slowly over time, but that sounds implausible with a bot network or one paid by stolen CC. Those kind of computers are not known for up-time, especially if they generate a lot of noise.

1.2 terabytes per second. Where do these people get the resources?

*terabits

It's a lot, but think about it this way, if the average home connection is say 10 megabits, it only takes a hundred to make a terabit. Some of these botnets command many thousands.

No, 100 connections 10 Mbps each would make it 1 Gbps not 1 Tbps.

Amplification attacks can be used to gain huge boosts in bandwidth.[1] For example, in the attack on Spamhaus in 2013[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Refle... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker#Spamhaus

bits, bytes whats the difference.

8 times currently.

Oops. Skipped.... several digits there. My basic math skills are in decline. I'd delete this comment if I could. Please downvote.

DailyDot claimed to have an interview with them a few days ago [0], interesting quote:

> “We’ve just got a bunch of people with really particular skill sets, and we’ve been working to get access to some of the core routing equipment of the Internet,” Cleary explained, excitement in his voice. “We’ve got some devices that are connected to the undersea cables that facilitate the Internet connects between the United States and Europe.

Obviously a big if, but if this is accurate they're abusing some of the core infrastructure which would be way beyond a simple botnet.

[0] http://www.dailydot.com/technology/lizard-squad-hackers/

And I've got some prime real-estate on Mars to sell you. Along with a spaceship that will get you there and back in 2 hours.

Why on earth would you ever believe anything that comes out of their collective mouths? If they had access to core routers - they'd be idiots to ever announce it publicly. The amount of money they could make selling that access on the black market would allow them to retire at whatever idiotic teenage age they're currently at.

Most of what they've been telling the media is obviously bogus bullshit. Sybil attack = Tor 0-day? Undersea cable taps to inject traffic??

They do control botnets (Vinnie operates a DDoS service at legion.cm) but certainly not on that scale.

It's been said that they were using Google's Compute Engine and there have been $500 coups given out recently.

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