Turkey arrests Anonymous suspects after DDoS protest

Turkish police have arrested 32 suspected members of Anonymous, the loosely knit cracktivist collective, following hack attacks against government websites. Anonymous supporters in Turkey vented their frustration against proposed net filtering legislation by running a series of denial of service attacks against government …

[Anonymous Coward]

Suspect is the key word

Anybody on the internet can use the LOIC, encouraged by Anonymous. Not everybody knows how to do it without getting caught.

This is like arresting random people in a protest and claiming that they caught the ringleaders...

AC, natch.

[NoneSuch]

Whenever...

a popular hacking group pops into the general consciousness, all sorts of "members" appear out of the woodwork and claim to be them. Given the ineptitude of this attack they are not Anonymous. We should call them what they are; Script kiddies.

[nyelvmark]

LOIC

The Low-Orbit Ion Cannon is quite a neat idea as a form of protest. Rather like attending a protest march that stops traffic for an hour. You don't cover your face - that would be hypocritical; you want to be seen as one of those who will stand up and be counted.

Unfortunately, if the number of people using it is numbered in the dozens, rather than in the tens of thousands, they're rather sticking their heads above the parapet. Imagine how long the Tiananmen square thing would have lasted if only a few dozen protestors had turned up.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOIC more like LOL

amirite?

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

tools that fail? Not.

"the activists made the mistake of using tools, such as Anonymous' Low Orbit Ion Cannon, that fail to cloak the identity of computers participating in denial of service attacks."

Well, LOIC doesn't fail at anything, it just doesn't spoof the adress. Apparently there's also a number of people using more complete tools such as hping and others, which do have the ability to spoof IPs, but refuse to spoof, by principle. See, there's a significant portion of these "Anonymous" people who see DDOS as a network form of the good ol' street demonstration, or picketting. That's quite comparable, when you think about it: sure it makes the shops along the way unreachable for a few hours, but there's usually little to no long-lasting damage (except for the reputation). There's the occasional opportunistic break-in but few street demonstration go without a smashed window or ten (although the collateral damage scale is clearly tipping towards the men in blue these days).

Just sayin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Lulz

Not as anonymous as they thought.

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Not Anon at all...

... they are all Spartacus.

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

FFS! Muppets!

So basically bunch mindless sheep follow the advice of a bunch of dingbats on a forum to use a tool to attack online sites, a tool that provides no anonymity whatsoever? The real story is why these planks weren't locked up sooner, for their own protection more than anything else!

[nyelvmark]

Maybe not muppets

I think you miss the point, Fuzzy. The LOIC is a protest tool. Using it through an anonymous proxy (or better, a long chain of such proxies) is certainly possible, but that would be indistinguishable from a DDOS attack organised by an individual using a botnet. It would be analogous to taking part in a protest march in disguise. Of course, there may be muppets who've used it thinking that nobody would know it was them, but I think that's just because they're muppets - not because they've been deceived by the evil mastermind who, as we all know, is really behind Anonymous. I'm not sure who that is, but I have my suspicions about the Dalai Lama.

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they used their neighbours' wifi?

I hope no-one did this:

- Find local wifi hotspot called LINKSYS or BELKIN54G.

- Launch LOIC

- Watch your neighbour get raided + LOL