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Who is Anonymous and what is their mission?
Originally published on April 3, 2013 on Coast Report
by Marivel Guzman | Staff Writer at Coast Report |
It is hard to describe in words what Anonymous really is. To most, it is a group of hackers who disrupt web pages and steal data. However, some think that they are doing good things for society.
The irony of the situation is that Anonymous is not a group that can be traced to a building or to a country. They are dispersed around the world — they have no offices, no leaders, they do not follow a strategy.
With its ever growing popularity, it has become a case of whether or not they can actually be considered criminals.
At Orange Coast College, most haven’t heard of it, but the students who had agreed that while they are hackers, they do things that benefit society.
Jairo Navarete, 24, computer science major at OCC, said Anonymous is a group of Internet activists and it is good when the group exposes bad information about certain companies.
“The government should not punish them with long sentences, because what they do not affect the company’s people — only the money,” he said.
Another student said the group usually has the people in mind.
“They are a group that speaks in favor of society’s best interest and only mean well,” said Garret Smith, 19, a video-game science major.
Some students said releasing confidential information can be valuable for society.
“I know they expose information that would be valuable for the public to know, that otherwise is kept secret to fulfill the government’s agenda,” said 20-year-old Jimmy Wakem.
The Obama administration says organizations such as WikiLeaks and hacking group LulzSec may conduct economic 
espionage against U.S. companies.
In fact, Anonymous members work independently but when they finish, they leave their calling card where they use their famous quote, “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
Anonymous has millions of followers on the Internet. Their Youtube videos have millions of views and they have become a type of cyber heroes.
Heroes or villains, the government has doubled its efforts to stop Anonymous’ activities, but it seems that the hacktivists are multiplying and Anonymous is growing every day.
Disclaimer: This article belongs to Coast report. The article was published on their print and online edition on April 3, 2013.
The Hackers wars
Posted on February 04, 2013 by Akashma Online News
by Marivel Guzman
Young bright computer geeks and social activists, at war with the establishment of governmental control and corporate greed.
Hacktivists against Government’s hackers-snitch-ex-anons or simply Fedhackers
What it is the maximum penalty for internet hacking? 1,5,10,35, or life in prison? All depend actually. If you are individual of interest for the district attorney’s office, you can be offer a deal, a deal you can not refuse.
If Aaron Swartz, our young privacy advocate, political and social activist was alive today, he probably can tell you about his 6 months in jail deal. Well, not that he accepted, so he was facing 35 years in jail, all because he did not want to play the district attorney’s sinister deal. This cost him his life.
What about the other “cyber breakers”? They all being offered a deal. One by one saw its day at the district attorney’s office. What do they do? All acted according to their conscience and sense of justice.
The district attorney’s office managed to brake few of them. Some of them “went to work” for the DA, some refused, but the simple truth is that now they are divided, scared and scattered.
Simple as this. The divide and conquer start showing inside the anon community. The paranoia is running wild. By now the Anons do not know who is snitch, who is being followed, and who is real anonymous. Once you see an anon’s name in the news, you are considered to be exposed.
The anons are doxing each other, they are snitching. And more scary for the anons, is that the Feds are hiring some of them and using them to infiltrate the ranks of the hackivist community. Who is wining this cyber war? Just in Indonesia, there is an estimate that
In some other instances the feds are blackmailing the anons already detained,they are being forced to work as snitches, in exchange to drop some of the charges.
By now, you should know how the district attorney’s office of crooks and escalators works. Once they arrest one anon, they will be offered two deals; One, to be an informant, a snitch in other words, if that is not accepted, they will probably be offer a deal, if that is refused also, the DA will play with the life of the defendants, using the unconstitutional trick called, plea bargain or blackmail. The DA assure with deals an 80 % of the cases a wining verdict. For them plea bargain or cases won sqare and fair in the court room is the same. They use this convictions to move up in the ladder of the office of the district attorney.
The less they care is justice being served. We can not help, but to remember Aaron Shwartz, the latest of its victims. Using the scare tactic, bringing outrageous charges, unheard charges on the book. Its call plea bargain. Aaron was offer 6 months in jail to plea guilty, off course innocent as he was he refused the Plea, Ortiz got mad and charged him with 9 counts of bogus charges that carried all together 35 years in jail.
Pleas Bargaining has come to dominate the administration of justice in America.
According to one legal scholar, “Every two seconds during a typical workday, a criminal case is disposed of in an American courtroom by way of a guilty plea or nolo contender plea. Even though plea bargaining pervade the justice system. He argue that the practice should be abolished because it is unconstitutional.
Government should not retaliate against individuals who exercise their right to trial by jury.
Plea Bargain it is one of the dirtiest tactics used by the government to coerce individuals into agreeing to plea guilty charges that they did not commit in exchange for waving their constitutional rights of a court trial.
Paul Lewis Hayes, serving life sentencing for writing a check of $ 88.30 and declining to accept a plea bargain of 5 years. The district attorney retaliated and charge him with another crime “Habitual Criminal Act”, which carries a mandatory life imprisonment. Hayes lost and appealed his conviction, took his case to the Supreme Court and 5 to 4 the supreme court upheld the conviction. The Case Against Plea Bargaining
The government has already understood that they lose the cyberwar, the youth in the planet outnumber the old. We seen the youth rebelling against the old in the
Please stop by and read International Strategy for Cyberspace, US government had said that will respond hackers attack military if necessary.
As a cyber space race looms, the military is looking for a few good geeks.
In Hacker Wars, rogue hackers on the payroll of malevolent corporations are taking over the Internet. Our privacy and basic liberties are being swept aside at an alarming rate. The only way to stop them is to beat them at their own game! Hackers like you have to stand on the side of freedom and fight for those who can not fight for themselves. In this war of the electron and the switch, there is no substitute for victory.
High school hackers, crackers and digital deviants: Uncle Sam wants you. Again the government blackmailing the youth of America. They want to use our youth to snitch each other in exchange for a pay check.
Anons hackers doxing each other. Who they working for? Feds? private firms, ego? Next Generation Fuckery
I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI-David Thomas ran one of the most popular online crime hubs, while the FBI ran him. El Mariachi
Anonymous hacker, commentator, journalist, and fameball Barrett Brown was arrested in a dramatic takedown last night live and on-camera, in the middle of a TinyChat with a dozen others.
Some weren’t worried. “Cool how the FBI staged @BarrettBrownLOL‘s arrest live on cam to bolster the idea he hasn’t been working for them for some time already,” said Methadonna on Twitter, voicing the suspicions of many. Daily Dot
The hacker group Anonymous is dealing with the arrest and betrayal of one of its most vocal members the only way it knows how: By hacking a security firm and covering its website with a rant against feds and snitches. To Snitch Sabu
Read the following story of Sabu, the mention of the victim SONY, makes the crimes more expensive and the years of jail multiply by the dollar $ Sign!!!!!
Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. Sabu, was outed Tuesday as a Puerto-Rican American resident of New York who pleaded guilty in August to an indictment on charges of computer crimes against targets ranging from Visa and Mastercard to the security firm HBGary and Sony that carried a maximum sentence of up to 124 years and six months in prison.
Six top computer hackers associated with groups such as Anonymous, LulzSec and AntiSec have been arrested and charged in New York in connection with a series of attacks on computers used by the entertainment industry, credit card companies, intelligence firms and even an Irish political party, U.S. officials announced Tuesday. Los Angeles Times
The FBI and Secret Service have successfully infiltrated the underground world of computer hackers in the US: 25 percent are secretly informing the government about their peers for fear of a long prison sentence. In fact, the community is riddled with paranoia and mistrust as it is not clear who is part of this “army of informants.” Tech Spot on hackers
One of the six, Hector Xavier Monsegur – also known by his computer name of “Sabu” – pleaded guilty and was said by officials to be working with the government against his former colleagues.
Brian Salcedo, now 23, has been in custody since 2003, when an FBI stakeout caught him and a partner breaking into several Lowe’s networks over an unsecured Wi-Fi connection at a suburban Detroit store. 8 years for Crazy Long Hacker
A skilled San Francisco computer intruder was sentenced here Friday to 13 years in federal prison for stealing nearly two million credit card numbers from banks, businesses and other hackers — in what is the longest hacking sentence in U.S. history. Record Sentence for hacker Max Vision
We see these hackers thieves that stole millions of dollars in wire fraud, their sentences are very small compared to Aaron Swartz 35 years sentence.
Hackers and thieves are notorious nowadays. In fact it’s all anyone tends to hear in the news, and they get long sentences. A con artist/thief stole millions of dollars and got sentenced to 150 years in Jail. Which obviously he won’t ever survive. A man who murdered two children, aged 10, and 12 respectively, got 14 years combined.
Who decide when a crime deserve more years in jail? Justice, Judge, Governor, District Attorney? Make your opinion count, demand accountability for harsh punishment and outrageous district attorney charges for social activist and dissidents.
“Being a federal prosecutor isn’t just a job, it’s a privileged position of power… And one of the things that goes with the unbridled power to decide who to indict and what charges will be brought; is the responsibility to use that power appropriately. Anyone who does not understand that responsibility should not be allowed to pass the bar, much less be handed the power to ruin lives with relative impunity.” Kurt Hopking
On January 14, 2013, Yesterday, it became public that Stephen Heyman oversaw TWO excessive prosecutions of hacker-defendants who committed suicide, Aaron Swartz and Jonathan James.
Swartz was charged with using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. He faced a maximum sentence of 31 years if convicted. Federal Reserve HACKED
Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 – May 18, 2008), was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States.The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Leonard Harris Sassaman (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an advocate for privacy, maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and remop (operator) of the randseed remailer.
Sassaman was a well-known cypherpunk, cryptographer and privacy advocate. He worked for Network Associates on the PGP encryption software, was a member of the Shmoo Group, a contributor to the OpenPGP IETF working group, the GNU Privacy Guard project, and frequently appeared at technology conferences like DEF CON. Sassaman was the co-founder of CodeCon along with Bram Cohen, co-founder of the HotPETS workshop (with Roger Dingledine of Tor and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin), co-author of the Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol, and at the age of 21, was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov. He committed suicide.
Ilya Zhitomirskiy (12 October 1989 – 12 November 2011)[1] was a Russian-American software developer and entrepreneur. Zhitomirskiy was a co-founder and developer of the Diaspora social network and the Diaspora free software that powers it. Diaspora could have destroyed facebook platform if being developed as Zhitomirskiy had planned.
On the evening of 12 November 2011, Zhitomirskiy was found dead in his San Francisco home by police responding to calls about a suspected suicide. An autopsy report from the Medical Examiner’s office formally ruled the death a suicide in April 2012. While press reports questioned whether the pressure of working on Diaspora had led to his suicide, Diaspora co-founder Maxwell Salzberg disagreed. Salzberg stated, “Yes, I agree that being a startup founder is stressful. But it wasn’t the stress of work that killed Ilya. He had his own issues. He was sick.” Zhitomirskiy’s mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, did not comment on reports of his history of mental illness, but she did say on his participation in Diaspora, “I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in school, he would be well and alive today.”
Diaspora is the Privacy Aware Open Source Social Network that puts you in control of your information.
With Diaspora you decide what you’d like to share, and with whom. RIP Ilya Co-founder of Diaspora
“”Indonesia has 65 thousand hackers and the largest base in Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta hackers on a more active and creative,” says IT analyst Onno W. Purbo here on Thursday. and the largest base in Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta hackers on a more active and creative,” says IT analyst Onno W. Purbo here on Thursday.
CHINA has revealed that millions of its computers have been hacked by the US in the past year, as it hits back at claims foreign media organisations had been infiltrated by Chinese spies. The Australian
Iranian official says bank attack blame is a smoke screen for the U.S. to continue launching cyber attacks against Iran. US blame Iran for hacking US bank
Hackers say coming air traffic control system lets them hijack planes
Posted on January 11, 2013 by Akashma Online News
GPS Hijacking Catches Feds, Drone Makers Off Guard
Source CSOonline
UPDATED by Marivel Guzman
When Iran brought down the US drones, their specialist insisted that Iran had hijacked the GPS system of the drones making with this outmaneuvers easy to drive down the drone without damage the computer system. Now we started to understand how easy is to divert planes, to drive planes onto buildings, or simply to highjack their computer systems.
Some conspiracy theories circulated on the internet circles about the remote control of the planes that crashed the Twin towers in New York in 2011, now does not look that hard, does it?
If a teenager can hijack a Multi Billion dollars system, imagine what an specialist trained on software field for years can do?
Years earlier the Israeli Michael Goff working for PTech, an Arab owned software company that develops key enterprise software for many government institutions like NORAD and FAA, using his secure channel with another israeli Amit Yoran, somehow manages to give Israeli army computer programmers access to this critical computer code. It was due to this manipulation that the hijackings on 9/11 remained unnoticed by the flight controller of NORAD. Once this was in place the planes could be taken over by remote control and flown into the World Trade Center. How 911 was done
An ongoing multibillion-dollar overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control (ATC) system is designed to make commercial aviation more efficient, more environmentally friendly and safer by 2025.
But some white-hat hackers are questioning the safety part. The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) will rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) instead of radar. And so far, several hackers have said they were able to demonstrate the capability to hijack aircraft by spoofing their GPS components.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has declared that it already has multiple measures to detect fake signals. But it has so far not allowed any independent testing of the system.
On June 19, when University of Texas researchers successfully hijacked a drone by “spoofing” it — giving it bad GPS coordinates – they showed the Department of Homeland Security how civilian drones could fall into the wrong hands, exposing a potentially serious security flaw. It was exactly what Todd Humphreys, the lead researcher, anticipated in a TEDx talk in February: “You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer.” July 20, 2012
The hacking exploits are not new. National Public Radio’s “All Tech Considered” reported last August that Brad Haines, a Canadian computer consultant known online as “RenderMan,” noted that the radio signals aircraft will send out to mark their identity and location under NextGen, called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), were both unencrypted and unauthenticated.
By spoofing those signals, Haines said he could create fake “ghost planes.”
“If I can inject 50 extra flights onto an air traffic controller’s screen, they are not going to know what is going on,” he told NPR. “If you could introduce enough chaos into the system – for even an hour – that hour will ripple though the entire world’s air traffic control.”
Haines presented his findings at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas last summer
Then there is the group of researchers from the University of Texas that successfully hijacked a civilian drone at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico during a test organized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last summer.
The system used to hijack the drone cost about $1,000. The NextGen program is expected to cost taxpayers $27 billion, plus another $10 billion spent by the commercial aviation industry.
In a third case, NPR reported that Andrei Costin, a Romanian graduate student in France, was able to build a software-defined radio hooked to a computer that created fake ADS-B signals in a lab. It cost him about $2,000. Costin made a presentation at last summer’s Black Hat conference.
Paul Rosenzweig, founder of Red Branch Law & Consulting and a former deputy assistant secretary for policy at DHS, wrote in a post last week on Lawfare that this amounts to the FAA continuing to dig itself into a deeper hole. One problem, he wrote, is that the eventual goal is to eliminate radar, which is inefficient because it requires planes to fly on designated radar routes.
“But the hardware for radar broadcasting and reception can’t (that I know of) be spoofed,” he wrote. “Today, when planes fly using GPS they ‘double check’ their location with radar. [But] the entire plan behind NextGen is to eventually get rid of the radar system — an expensive 20th century relic, I guess. But then we are completely dependent on GPS for control.”
[See also: Insecure industrial control systems, hacker trends prompt federal warnings]
The FAA told NPR that besides confirming ADS-B signals with radar, the NextGen system will automatically check to make sure the correct receivers are picking up the correct signals. If a “ghost plane” is sending a signal to the wrong receiver, it would be spotted as fake. Third, it will use a technique called “multilateration” to determine exactly where every ADS-B signal is sent from.
Nick Foster, a partner of Brad Haines, praised the use of multilateration. “But I still wonder if it would be possible to fool the system on the edges,” he told NPR. “I think the FAA should open it up and let us test it.”
The risks of GPS hacks extend beyond aviation. Logan Scott, a GPS industry consultant, told Wired magazine last year [http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/drone-hijacking/2/] that GPS is also used to control the power grid, to power banking operations including ATMs and to keep oil platforms in position. The world’s cellular networks also rely on it.
And given that it is free, unauthenticated and unencrypted makes it vulnerable. “The core problem is that we’ve got a GPS infrastructure which is based on a security architecture out of the 1970s,” Scott said.
Not everybody sees the GPS vulnerability as a major safety problem, however. Martin Fisher is now director of information security at Wellstar Health System, but worked previously in commercial aviation for 14 years. He said radar will still be around, even when the transition to NextGen is complete.
“Don’t for a moment believe there won’t be radar anymore,” he said. “Commercial aircraft will still have anti-collision radar and proximity alarms.”
Beyond that, he said, “do not make the assumption that the pilots flying your aircraft simply follow the instructions of ATC like automatons. These are very highly trained men and women with years of experience flying day, night, good weather, bad weather.”
Paul Rosenzweig said he would still be much more comfortable if the FAA would allow the system to be “stress tested.”
Whatever bugs are in the system, there may be more than 12 years available to fix them. The Washington Post reported in September that Calvin L. Scovel III, inspector general for the Department of Transportation, told a House subcommittee that the program was “four years behind schedule and $330 million over budget.”
The Trojan Horse than landed in Iran – Drones are Spies on the air, steel birds that fly at low altitude and can pick up signals of conversations from cell phones, cordless phones, digital radios, digital TV’s sets and they have the capabilities to take images using infrared technology, and snap pictures as small a few pixels, this amazing and surprising disturbing technology that have taken away the peace of mind, sleep and every bit of privacy to the citizens of the world. These steel birds have the spies agencies and best reverse engineers (theives) of the world fighting each other for the software and hardware blue prints.
Cyber criminals could increasingly look to attack, hijack smartphones in 2013 (Yahoo Security) – Some cyber criminals who disseminate viruses and malware in attempts to hijack computers are beginning to shift their focus. Your smartphone may be their next target. PC users have learned to be constantly vigilant to the threat of viruses, which attack relentlessly, slow down computers and potentially put valuable personal information at risk. Windows computers will continue to be targeted going forward but cyber thieves are casting a wider net in the hunt for digital prey.
Read more about access control in CSOonline’s Access Control section.
Related Stories
Using a laptop, a small antenna and an electronic GPS “spoofer” built for $3,000, GPS expert Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas took control of the sophisticated navigation system aboard an $80 million, 210-foot super-yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.
“We injected our spoofing signals into its GPS antennas and we’re basically able to control its navigation system with our spoofing signals,” Humphreys told Fox News. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/07/26/exclusive-gps-flaw-could-let-terrorists-hijack-ships-planes/
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