Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed Hackers’ IP Addresses(blogs.forbes.com) |
Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed Hackers’ IP Addresses(blogs.forbes.com) |
I also strongly suspect no one of any significance in this story is particularly worried about this exposure. Anyone smart who is participating in potentially illegal activities would be particularly careful about using proxies for sensitive work; and planning is definitely sensitive. I would also assume, were I a participant in Anonymous activities, that any site claiming to be representative of Anonymous has at least a 50% chance of being operated by the FBI or a rogue security company running black hat operations along the lines of HB Gary Federal. It'd be absolutely foolish to connect to such a site directly, and the members of Anonymous who are doing the real heavy lifting are probably not fools.
I'm not sure why you assume they're smart. Most of 'em are probably about fifteen years old.
Anonymous is anybody that wants to be Anonymous, including people who have never been Anonymous in the past and will never be Anonymous in the future...but, quite a bit of what Anonymous has done required specialized knowledge and experience and intelligence. Those are the people the FBI would like to identify, and they're also the people least likely to be identified by a data leak like this. So, a leak of Anonymous IP addresses is really probably a leak of kids who haven't actually done much damage and a handful of Tor exit node addresses representing the people within Anonymous who know how to wreak havoc.
That's part of the strength of Anonymous. If there is a crackdown of any sort, it will snare a bunch of innocent (or close enough to innocent) kids, and miss all of the real targets completely. Law enforcement could only pin the blame on dumb 15 year olds so many times before it begins to seem ridiculous (especially since if they claimed to "take down" Anonymous by doing so, there'd be a slew of attacks by Anonymous just to prove no such thing had taken place and the people they'd arrested were innocent bystanders).
1. Anonymous does, in fact, have enough of a centralized leadership that they can pull off this kind of thing as an attention-getting disinformation tactic.
2. This "rogue admin" is working with the feds as part of some kind of deal. By releasing some info they get some people to panic, drop their defenses, generate chatter, and then they observe who's talking to whom and who's wiping their disks.
3. What do you know? Anarchists have their power struggles too. Anonymous may fail to maintain enough of an identity to remain relevant.
4. All of the above.
FTFY. (And true hackers would have been behind proxies or using a public wifi network anyway).
The whole Anonymous thing was getting a little too big, IMO, and needed something like this to fragment it and make the kids involved start thinking about the rest of their lives. I hope a few well meaning but naieve people quit while they're ahead, wipe their disks, and realize that some government agency has probably been tracking them down for a while & that this is a blessing in disguise.
My statement was about people who have involved themselves with this who are kids. We've seen pictures of who the FBI rounded up.
Thats poor planning. A coup doesn't work within an structure where the only authority is whoever you feel like going along with today. Then again anonymous is a train-wreck happening again and again powered only by internet drama, so I can't say I'm surprised.