SourceForge pulls off fake, 'Trojan-wrapped' Anonymous OS tool

Prominent members of Anonymous have said that a open-source distro bearing the hacktivist group's moniker is nothing to do with them and is likely to be riddled with Trojans. Anonymous OS Live – supposedly an Ubuntu-based OS, which advertises itself as being pre-loaded with various hacking tools and utilities (Tor, John the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Pwned

Thousands of wannabe 1337 haxors pwned. Serves them right, but seems likely to cause the rest of us even more headaches.

Anon, obv.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pwned

No, no, no. It's not really infected with anything.

"They" just want you to think it is to put you off downloading it! Imagine the chaos that would be caused if all of anonymous had copies of the tremendously powerful hacking tools in that installation!

[Matt Bryant]

Re: Re: Pwned

"....Imagine the chaos that would be caused if all of anonymous had copies...." It would be a bit like giving kiddies chainsaws, they'd mostly be a danger to themselves. If they want those "tools" then they can get them a lot more safely from any number of sites.

[Tchou]

Re: Pwned

If one call himself a hacker in the original sense of the word, one would learn to programm his own versions of these tools.

[Mondo the Magnificent]

Ooh, Trojans..

if it is full of Trojans, I'd like to know which ones they are.. ENZ, Pleasures, Magnum or perhaps the legendary Trojan Vibrating Twister...

[tkioz]

The fact that 37,000 people downloaded such an obvious virus ridden troll pack makes me weep for humanity...

[Matt Bryant]

Re: tkioz

Even worse, they like to claim they are the 99%! Suddenly I feel very, very, very smart.

[admiraljkb]

Re: tkioz

I *suspect* that at least half of those were Tech journalists, security researchers, security experts as well as "experts", as well a good chunk of the blogosphere trying to break a story so they're blog gets quoted by the evening news. :) The other half would be under 25 and still in the parents' basement.

[Anonymous Coward]

It might have been a honeypot that was set up by a government agency.

[Matt Bryant]

Are you being sponsored by Rusol to make such silly statements?

[Jamie Kitson]

Surely

AnonymOS

[dotdavid]

Unanonymous

Surely by installing an Anonymous-branded OS you're outing yourself as an Anonymous member and therefore are no longer Anonymous?

I suspect that it was some kind of honeypot, or perhaps just someone doing it "for the lulz" or whatever the correct term is nowadays.

[Smudge@mcr]

Just a publicity stunt

This was just a publicity stunt organised by Microsoft to try and associated Linux with "hackers" and the "bad people" in the general publics mind.

Dont belive me?

Just look at the coverage the Microsoft friendly BBC Technology page gave this none story.

(the BBC's head of technology is ex MS)

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just a publicity stunt

I just read it. You're being totally ridiculous.

Oh and since when does Senior IT guy from big company goes to IT company to further his career equate to a conspiracy? If he went to Red Hat you wouldn't be complaining, would you?

[Steve Knox]

Re: AC @16:31

"Oh and since when does Senior IT guy from big company goes to IT company to further his career equate to a conspiracy?"

Yeah, because it's never happened that, e.g, some guy leaves Microsoft to be a CEO of some other tech company (since this is purely hypothetical AND NEVER HAPPENED, let's just say a a mobile phone company), which abruptly does a complete about-face, drops all existing projects, and becomes a Microsoft-only shop -- exactly when Microsoft's offering in the given sector really needs a shot in the arm.

You'd have to be completely bonkers to think something like that would happen, or if it did, that it was anything other than complete coincidence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: AC @16:31

@Steve, that would be the opposite of what the OP alleges to have happened in this case.

Also, in the case of Nokia they must have known what they would get, I strongly suspect they wanted to move in that kind of direction anyway.

[DrXym]

What sort of moron...

... would ever install an OS from Anonymous? Almost by definition it would be malware.

[eulampios]

@DrXym

Let's say, to try it in a VM. Run md5sum, compare it with the Ubu/Debian packages... and write an article? Of course it wouldn't be a smart idea to use it a real system.

Well, a lot of Windows users do it on the daily basis by downloading and installing stuff from unknown locations.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @DrXym

How are the MD5s of the packages going to help you know that they haven't been tampered with after installation?

I wanted to make a dodgy OS, what I'd do is:

Make OS with all the required packages

Install perfectly normally

First boot, upload malware from the Internet

Remove the code that uploads the malware

You can look at all the MD5s you want and this will not be detected, the only chance is if someone notices that their internet connection is being used more than expected on the first boot and that's not too likely.

[phil mcracken]

security tools for noobs...

Anon OS? Sounded slightly suspect to begin with, especially if LOIC is bundled with it. They should market that as a criminal record generation tool.

Anyone who wanted a linux OS full of security tools would probably already have Knoppix STD, Backtrack or nUbuntu, all of which are gremlin free :)