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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

'Anonymous' group attempts DDoS attack against Australian government

By | September 9, 2009, 3:03pm PDT

Summary: Following a threat posted on YouTube a month ago, the the well known malicious pattern of the “Anonymous group” failed to materialize earlier today when the group attempted to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the web sites of Australia’s Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s web site as [...]

Following a threat posted on YouTube a month ago, the the well known malicious pattern of the “Anonymous group” failed to materialize earlier today when the group attempted to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the web sites of Australia’s Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s web site as a protest against Internet censorship.

What tactics did they use, why it failed and who’s behind it? Let’s review the 09-09-2009.org campaign, as well as Operation Didgeridie.

From a technical perspective, the attack was a low-level crowdsourcing DDoS attack that only managed to shut down the Primer Minister’s web site for only a few minutes through multiple web requests run under several different threads, a standard feature for average denial of service tools.

Despite the campaigner’s propaganda site descriptive enough to point out 09-09-2009.org as the day for the attack, the use of link baiting for the purpose of increasing the load on a web server, usually has a short-lived effect, which is exactly what appears to have taken place earlier today.

Who’s behind the attack, or may have something to do with the organizational efforts? Just like a previous case related to the “anonymous” group’s DDoS activities on behalf of their members, where a 19-year-old teen pleaded guilty for organizing the attack against the Church of Scientology, in this very latest attack,there appears to be a teen involved in the 09-09-2009.org site.

The 09-09-2009.org Campaign

Data speaks for itself. A cached copy of the propaganda site from August, includes a link — now removed — to a MySpace profile (myspace.com/andthesearethetemptation) which is now redirecting to the profile of a 17-year-old teen from Australia who has also posted a blog entry featuring “Anonymous”group’s propaganda video.

A brief retrospective of the teen’s attempt to monetize his MySpace popularity by offering to send MySpace bulletins — spamming in this case — to his users, indicates that he’s been trying to do so since 2007, when he was offering to send 5 bulletins for $3 to 927 Friends! under the same account, followed by another ad using the handle “AusieHerp” offering to send 150 friend requests for a dollar.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to establish a connection here, especially when the low-level crowdsourcing DDoS attack is theoretically in the arsenal of every 17-year-old MySpace rock star with 5773 (automatically added) friends on his profile, who’s been monetizing their number since he was 15. Where the teen is clearly involved, the real coordination is happening from a publicly accessible Wiki under Operation Didgeridie.

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Topics

Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response.

Disclosure

Dancho Danchev

More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile.

Biography

Dancho Danchev

Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data with the rest of the community on a daily basis. More details on Dancho Danchev's current and past professional affiliations, can be found in his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter

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Intended to protest govt filtering AntiScientology content. =Blasphemy Law?
invmgr@... 10th Sep 2009
No doubt Anon's methods are fubar. But the goal was spot on. If we start filtering stuff the science god just doesn't like, where does it end? With all the oppression, suppression, and repression of exactlywhat scientology is, how will we know what is truth or lie? (Unless you pay enough to the church to obtain enlightenment) Or do we filter everything (truth included) that reflects badly on this particular religion?
And then there is that unspoken philosophical non disclosure thingy. Suppressed and enforced with lawsuits, physical abuse, brainwashing, and harassment of former members and critics. Is God the IP of the scientologists?
The Anonymous group to me is a online terrorist organization, spamming, bullying, and hacking websites at any given time. Their acts are so random that it is hard to take many of their causes seriously.

Sad to see this act against Australian government.
Another moronic attempt to spraypaint a wall with meaningless tags, despite their supposed goal of stopping Internet censorship.

However, this does not take away from the Australian Government's attempt to shutdown Internet access by the people of Australia, which is a lot more serious than some idiot's DDoS attack on Kevin's website. I'm also surprised that they thought an attack on these sites would even be noticed - for denial of service to be effective people actually have to want to access the site wink
You have to understand, "Anonymous" is such a loose term...anyone/anywhere can say they are "a member of Anonymous." DDosing that some people do is stupid, BUT the "Anonymous" members fighting to expose the lies, abuse and brainwashing of the Church of Scientology and their tyrannical leader David Miscavige (who beats and abuses his staff) is totally on point.

Summary: "Anonymous" is not a defined group, but the Church of Scientology involved "Anonymous" are doing a good thing.

See: whyweprotest . net for more info.
You have to understand, "Anonymous" is such a loose term...anyone/anywhere can say they are "a member of Anonymous." DDosing that some people do is stupid, BUT the "Anonymous" members fighting to expose the lies, abuse and brainwashing of the Church of Scientology and their tyrannical leader David Miscavige (who beats and abuses his staff) is totally on point.

Summary: "Anonymous" is not a defined group, but the Church of Scientology involved "Anonymous" are doing a good thing.

See: xenu . net for more info.
No doubt Anon's methods are fubar. But the goal was spot on. If we start filtering stuff the science god just doesn't like, where does it end? With all the oppression, suppression, and repression of exactlywhat scientology is, how will we know what is truth or lie? (Unless you pay enough to the church to obtain enlightenment) Or do we filter everything (truth included) that reflects badly on this particular religion?
And then there is that unspoken philosophical non disclosure thingy. Suppressed and enforced with lawsuits, physical abuse, brainwashing, and harassment of former members and critics. Is God the IP of the scientologists?

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