Anonymous plans DDoS attack on GCHQ in snoop law protest The Home Office website is back online following a weekend of disruptive denial-of-service attacks by Anonymous. The hacktivist collective also launched traffic-flooding assaults against the official website of the UK prime minister, number10.gov.uk, and the UK's Ministry of Justice as part of a protest against the UK's …
Agreed. This has been script kiddies and armchair beardstrokers attacking badly secured webservers so far - BIG. DEAL. But sooner or later somebody in there might actually attack something more substantial, though if they are smart - egos are traditionally the letdown of the real hacker - they will tell nobody about it.
I don't know much about "hacking" but surely rallying a bunch of script kiddies mixed with hard-core hackers to attack the experts in countering this sort of behaviour is asking for the less able hackers to be found out and prosecuted.
At least attempting to hack the Chinese isn't generally going to generate a knock on the door from the rozzers or worse (though if you REALLY annoyed them, it might be much, much worse).
"....as we no longer need that £100m set aside...." But actually that is a big problem. DDoS "attacks" are just a waste of everyones' money, especially the taxpayers. They're not real "attacks", they're the Internet equivalent of playing your ghettoblaster too loud, below even the digital graffiti of web defacement. All this type of senseless vandalism does is mean more money is taken from other projects and poured into widening front-end bandwidth to guard against skiddie idiocy, and Police time is wasted trying to sort the LOIC-fodder muppets from the real numpties pulling the strings. Next time you're in a queue to get an operation on the NHS, don't forget to thank the Anonyputzs. Next time your friend gets mugged in an area with bad streetlighting, you can thank them again. Anons - doing it because they're stupid.
I wonder if we'll get to find out who has the upper hand in this arms race? I'm not convinced that it's possible for even a state to catch a clued-up and paranoid hacker who is merely launching DoS attacks on an internet address from bots. (The real spy-secret kit is doubtless a much harder target, heavily firewalled and hardened or entirely off-net).
"entirely off net"
That can't be for the obvious reason that they need to collect data to do their job. So you could think of DOSing them by sending PDFs with some exploits which will do funny things inside their collection/filtering infrastructure. If you are lucky and capable, your software might even report back to you.
Just find an exploit in libpoppler or Libreoffice and I am sure you are in that game. Just broadcast the funny stuff via SATCOM.
I was thinking that when I read it. My skills in this area are shockingly amateur, but even good ones will find it kind of like...
Wrapping your hands in bandages, and trying to pickpocket John Gotti, or,
deliberately throwing a pint over Zara Philips on a night out with her husband and his mates or,
shooting at children in Hereford town centre,
However, it will make for a good showing on the Darwin Awards next year.
Worth bearing in mind from the article is that it's only DoS that's been demostrated so far, which is hardly hacking and is relatively easy to arrange.
I suspect DoS was rated as low risk by HO IT Sec , so there's been no mitigation in place until now. I suspect that'll change in future now.
Once they can deface the sites, then we'll see. They'd still have to hack into core (as per my comments above) for this to be credible.
No bunker in Cheltenham. They do tours of the 'local' computer suite for family members of employee's. Elsewhere in the Uk though who knows ;) Corsham has an underground bunker that I think holds top secret info. Can't confirm if its GCHQ or Military, as I don't know. Its where Skynet lives I think. That's not a joke either, its really what the military called their satellite system.
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"Corsham has an underground bunker that I think holds top secret info"
It wasn't ya'lls. It was American technically but run under a NATO mandate. Had something to do with ACE HIGH and AUTOVON. Which is precisely as far as Im going with this. I doubt there's anything there thats still secret unless its been repurposed.
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