Symantec is unmoved by Norton Anti Virus source release

by Dave neal

SECURITY FIRM Symantec was expecting hacker group Anonymous to release the source code for its 2006 Norton Anti Virus product.

The hackers had already leaked code from Symantec when the firm told us that it was expecting a further release from the group.

"Symantec is aware of the claims made by Anonymous that it has recently posted source code for the 2006 version of Norton Antivirus. We are still in the process of analyzing the code to confirm its authenticity," it told the INQUIRER late Friday.

"We anticipate that at some point, Anonymous will also post the code for the 2006 version of Norton Internet Security, which they also claim to possess. As we have already stated publicly, this is old code, and Symantec and Norton customers will not be at an increased risk as a result of any further disclosure related to these 2006 products."

Shortly afterwards code from Norton Anti Virus appeared online, an event that was celebrated by the hacktivists but batted away by the security firm.

"Everyone's known Norton/Symantec's been a complete joke for.. well forever but LOL @Symantec u mad?", said the @Anonpress Twitter account. "This past week #Anonymous released Symantec src, defaced police & security firm sites, and took down the Vatican. Who said it was weakened?" added @Youranonnews.

Symantec quickly responded to the leak on Twitter, confirming that the release was its code, but adding that it would not affect its users.

"Source code for 2006 versions of NAV posted by Anonymous is authentic but poses no increased risk to our users," it said.

Tunisia: Anonymous Hacks Islamist Party's Facebook Page

Tunisia Live (Tunis)

The Facebook page of Hizb Ettahrir, an Islamist political party that is legally unrecognized in Tunisia, was hacked last night by a Tunisian group claiming affiliation with the international cyber activist collective Anonymous.

A representative of the Tunisian Anonymous group, calling himself "CaliforniaKB," said that the attack was motivated by the activity of the Tunisian hacking group Fellaga, who he accused of working for Hizb Ettahrir, and last Wednesday's desecration of the national flag by an Islamist protester at Manouba University.

The representative said that the group did not have an ideological orientation, but was simply defending the "people's freedom."

"We are not liberals, we do not represent any political party. We are for the people, we are the people. We fight fire with fire, we were watching and doing nothing until we saw the Tunisian flag getting down in Manouba University," CaliforniaKB explained.

CaliforniaKB also stated that the group is not against Islamism. "We are not against Hizb Ettahrir. Personally, I am a Muslim; we are against any extremist idea whether from left, right or center," he asserted.

Ridha Belhaj, spokesperson of Hizb Ettahrir, expressed that the party was undaunted by the attack. "This is a cowardly thing to do; instead of confronting us, they resorted to these methods. This will not put us down, we will always be here," Belhaj said.

Belhaj also declared that Hizb Ettahrir was not involved in the flag incident that occurred in Manouba university. "We had nothing to do with it. We are against violence - these are Hizb Ettahrir principles," said Belhaj.

The representative of Anonymous in Tunisia threatened future attacks against the Tunisian government if they do not, "achieve the aims of the revolution," and claimed to have access to incriminating e-mails and "financial documents" about the government.

"We do have access to many secret files. We are waiting for the good moment to take you down unless you finish the revolution in the right way," said CaliforniaKB.

ANONYMOUS Revolution 2012 New Message What we are capable of!

Anonymous Members Arrested - FBI Fear Mongering?

25 members of the global hacker group Anonymous were arrested in Europe by Interpol. In America the FBI is fear mongering and talking about cyber 'terrorism'. Are comparisons to terrorists relevant? The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on document leaks and how our corrupt government is protecting the interests of private corporations over the interests of the American people.

'Anonymous' Member Admits Hacking UK Abortion Site

by Naharnet Newsdesk

A member of the international computer hacking group Anonymous pleaded guilty in court in Britain on Saturday to breaking into and defacing the website of an abortion service.

James Jeffery, 27, said he targeted the site because he disagreed with his sister's decision to terminate her pregnancy, Westminster Magistrates Court in central London heard.

He stole around 10,000 records with the details of women who had registered with the site, and replaced the logo of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service with the Anonymous symbol.

Jeffrey then boasted about the attack on Twitter, using the alias "Pablo Escobar" after the Colombian drug lord who died in 1993 and printing the name and log-on details of a BPAS administrator.

Police arrested him on Friday at his home in Wednesbury, central England, after the abortion service raised the alarm.

Jeffrey admitted one charge of gaining unauthorized access to data and another of gaining unauthorized access to a computer with the intention of impairing its operation.

Judge Daphne Wickham described him as a "zealot with an anti-abortion campaign".

She refused to grant him bail, saying that he was an "able hacker" who could target other organizations and ordering that he should be held in custody until sentencing at a later date.

On Tuesday two Britons with alleged ties to Anonymous were among five people charged in the United States in in high-profile cyber attacks after a leader of the group became an FBI informant.

Ryan Ackroyd, 23, of Doncaster, and Jake Davis, 29, of Lerwick, Shetland Islands, were both arrested last year in Britain

Anonymous in Paris: Anti-ACTA protest video

Supporters of the Anonymous hacker group, which is calling to halt moves by governments to tighten control over the internet, gathered near the Pompidou Center in Paris on Saturday. The group says it is trying to attract ordinary citizens' attention to the violation of rights and freedoms. In particular, the group is protesting against the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which promotes the creation of criminal sanctions against internet providers and users who do not comply with the legality of content saved or uploaded. The group gained fame because of its attacks on the websites of various organizations and institutions.

Op-Ed: Latest release by Anonymous ― What are we capable of? 2.0 - Revolution 2012

By Anne Sewell





Anonymous has released a new video, telling the world exactly what they are capable of. Not simply hackers, Anonymous is a worldwide collective protest. 
Since early 2011, there have been many protests worldwide. Globally peaceful protesters have been shot with rubber bullets and in some countries real bullets, sprayed with tear gas and pepper spray and brutally beaten by police officers. 
People are sick of the constant wars, allegedly on "terror". They have had enough of the corruption of governments and financial institutions. The threat of internet censorship hovers around us constantly. New bills give the government the right to detain and even kill American citizens, both in the USA and overseas, without charge. 
They say "enough is enough". 
In the video Anonymous advises that it is now declaring war on the United States. Life will get very interesting in 2012. 
The following is a statement made on 7 March 2012 by the collective Anonymous: 
"Each of us has our own path, but each of us share the same goal, a free humanity - together we stand. 
People all around our world have made the choice to rise against this corrupted system. 
The resistance continues. 2011 will forever be remembered as a year of global uprising. 2012, the whispers of revolution blow in the wind. 
We are anonymous. 
We continue to support the people as we "occupy" because we truly believe another world is possible, a world where choices are made from the heart, a world free of fear. 
As humanity continues to connect at an accelerating rate, we continue to cross all borders. With knowledge comes understanding, with understanding we can overcome our issues, we must live in a world free of censorship. 
As you watch this video governments around the world continue to arrest Anons and beat peaceful protesters. 
They fear us because we are evolving faster than they can control. We can no longer exist in their world of fear. It is time to make our own change. 
Now is the time to make our stand. There is no ONE right answer, our resistance must be as colourful as the spectrum. You can only disturb the hive so much before you get stung! 
The people will only take so much! 
You can no longer contain us! 
We are just getting warmed up!"

Anonymous hacker planned to publish details of women who had abortions

Damien Pearse


Court hears James Jeffery stole 10,000 database records of women registered with Britain's biggest abortion provider BPAS

Pedestrians walk past a central London clinic run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, whose database was stolen in the attack. Photograph: Raphael Satter/AP

A member of the hacking collective Anonymous broke into the website of Britain's biggest abortion provider and planned to publicly release the details of women who used the service.

James Jeffery, 27, stole around 10,000 database records containing the personal details of women who had registered with the site before "boasting" of his crime on Twitter.

Westminster magistrates court, London, heard that the hacker had also identified "vulnerabilities" on a string of websites including those for the FBI, the CIA and the Houses of Parliament.

Jeffery, of Castle Street, Wednesbury, West Midlands, showed no emotion as he appeared in the dock this morning to admit two offences under the Computer Misuse Act.

The court was told that Jeffery, who was arrested in a police swoop on his home during the early hours of Friday, intended to "release all the details" of those registered on the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) site.

But he had a change of heart because he thought doing so would be "wrong", the court was told.

Earlier he had taken to Twitter, under the name Pablo Escobar, to prove he had accessed hundreds of usernames and email addresses. This involved him printing the name and logon details of a BPAS administrator.

He also managed to deface the BPAS website with the Anonymous logo and a statement.

Jeffery later confessed to his crimes during interviews with detectives, telling police two friends had had abortions which he disagreed with, the court heard.

Officers who traced the BPAS breach to Jeffery's home found his computer "in the process of being wiped clean". They seized a number of items including an iPad, iPhone, three laptops, a hard drive and a notebook.

The court was told that police were investigating further alleged hacking by Jeffery, involving websites for the FBI, CIA, West Midlands police, the Houses of Parliament, the US navy, Arizona police and Spanish police.

Deputy Senior District Judge Daphne Wickham described Jeffery as a "zealot with an anti-abortion campaign". She adjourned the case, telling the court she did not have "sufficient" powers to pass sentence.

Refusing an application for bail, she added: "Many, many other organisations and people's private details would be at risk. You clearly are an able hacker. You will be remanded in custody."

He will be sentenced at Southwark crown court at a later date.

If Anonymous shuts down internet, this is how they could do it.

Athima Chansanchai

If Anonymous is able to blackout the Web on March 31, as the buzz goes, then one likely way they'll do it is to disable the Internet's "phone book" -- its Domain Name System, which converts domain names into IP addresses.

Ars Technica describes, in great detail, how the loosely organized, international group of hacktivists responsible for denial of service attacks big and small could use a technique called DNS amplification to take us back to 1992.

Recently, Anonymous has had a streak of hits, including a revenge attack on Panda Security, which members of the hacking group falsely believed helped authorities rein in six LulzSec members, and a recentattack on the Vatican's website. Previous targets included the CIA, an FBI cybersecurity partner and several law enforcement sites around the country.  This Technolog report goes in-depth about the very real possibility of a power grid shutdown, quoting from the NSA chief.

Anonymous' usual MO is to overload websites with access requests, so a DNS amplification could be seen as a mega-version of that approach, as described by Ars Technica:

DNS amplification hijacks an integral part of the Internet’s global address book, turning a relatively small stream of requests from attacking machines into a torrent of data sent to the target machines, potentially delivering network traffic of tens or hundreds of gigabytes per second without revealing the source of the attack. It does so by using a vulnerability in the DNS service that's been known since at least 2002.

Using these two things—recursive lookups that return large amounts of data to small queries, and spoofed source addresses—attacks can be made. The attacker first finds a server that is configured to enable recursive lookups. He then sends a large number of requests to the server, spoofing the source address so that the server thinks that the victim machine is making the request. Each of these requests is chosen so that it generates a large response, much larger than the queries themselves. The server will then send these large responses to the victim machine, inundating it with traffic. The disparity between the request size and the response is why these attacks are known as "amplification" attacks.

Whatever comes next, it doesn't look like Anonymous is going to let up anytime soon. Consider this March 8 tweet, from @YourAnonNews: "War is our imperative. And if right now victory seems like an impossibility, then we have something else to reach for: revenge, payback."

Arrests don’t mean the end of the road for Anonymous

London: In turning one of its best-known hackers into an informant and breaking open the highest profile elements of the “Anonymous” movement, authorities have dealt a serious blow to a group they found a growing irritant.

But as the broader “Anonymous” label – complete with its iconic Guy Fawkes mask imagery – is used by ever more disparate causes worldwide, it may be all but impossible to shut it down for good.

US authorities revealed on Wednesday that leading Anonymous hacker “Sabu” – real name Hector Xavier Monsegur, aged 28 – had been arrested last June in his apartment in a Manhattan housing complex.

According to a newly released court transcript, he agreed to cooperate with authorities in return for likely leniency – helping US prosecutors bring charges against five more men, including two in Britain and two in Ireland. All had also been previously arrested.

“Sabu was seen as a leader,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finnish security firm f-secure. “Just yesterday people were looking up to him… it’s a very serious blow. It’s probably not going to be the end of Anonymous but it’s going to take a while for them to recover, particularly from the paranoia.”

All six were said to be senior members of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous that took credit for a range of hacking attacks on government and private sector websites. Targets included the CIA, Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, Japan’s Sony Corpand a host of others including in Ireland and Mexico.

Taking inspiration from the hacking and Internet community as well as popular culture – particularly the 2005 film “V for Vendetta” in which a masked hero fights a dystopian government – Anonymous emerged in the middle of the last decade.

Initially focused on fighting attempts at Internet regulation and blocking free illegal downloads, it has since taken on a range of other targets including Scientology and the global banking system. Governments have been a growing target, both Western and in more autocratic states such as China and Iran. Websites have been attacked and occasionally shut down.

But Anonymous – and LulzSec in particular – leapt to much greater prominence in late 2010 when they launched what they described as the “first cyber war” in retaliation for attempts to shut down the Wikileaks website.

They attacked websites such as MasterCard that tried to block payments to Wikileaks after apparent pressure from the US government following the release of thousands of diplomatic cables.

“No honour among thieves”?

“This is probably the end of this particular group,” said Tim Hardy, a British activist and computer scientist who runs the blog “Beyond Clicktivism. ” But… part of the point of Anonymous is that it’s a group that anyone can say they are part of, whether they are attacking a website or wearing a mask outside the Church of Scientology.”

Those masks became an increasingly frequent sight on Western streets in 2011, increasingly adopted by more radical, libertarian and sometimes anarchist elements of European and US protest groups.

They became a frequent sight at demonstrations such as “Occupy Wall Street” and its spin-offs elsewhere in the US and Britain. They were also heavily used by the “indignados” anti-austerity protesters in Spain, where fancy dress shops ran out of stock and had to import them from abroad.

Such popular usage will likely continue, but the loss of some of the movement’s highest profile stars and technical experts will still hurt.

Web forums frequented by Anonymous were frothing with abuse and anger following the arrests on Tuesday. “Sabu” had been occasionally suspected of being a mole, but had continued to operate as an effective leader advising other hackers on the importance of maintaining anonymity and security.

“No honour among thieves,” said Tony Dyhouse, a computer security expert at UK defence firm QinetiQ who has long studied hackers. “Any further (Anonymous) actions are likely to be much more low-key. Fear is in the ranks. However, there will be many that see some of the casualties as martyrs and empty footprints to be filled.”

Computer security experts say the hackers of LulzSec appeared much more technically adept than had been usual for Anonymous, which has often relied on simple – if illegal – software that can be downloaded by any potential hacker regardless of their technical skills.

“FEATHER IN CAP FOR FEDS”

While many of its attacks – often distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks designed to overload websites – were relatively simple, LulzSec penetrated secure commercial systems to steal highly sensitive information.

These included credit card details of users of Sony’s latest PlayStation platform as well as client details and some 5 million e-mails from US specialist geopolitical publisher and sometime private intelligence firm Stratfor. The Stratfor e-mails were then passed on to Wikileaks, which is now publishing them.

US authorities said one of those arrested this week, Jeremy Hammond – a Chicago resident who styled himself “Anarchaos” – had been charged with the Stratfor hack. Another of those arrested, 19-year-old Donncha O’ Cearrbhail, was charged with another recent high profile success – the hacking of a conference call between the FBI and London detectives discussing action against hackers.

“Undoubtedly this is a big feather in the cap for the Feds,” said QinetiQ’s Dyhouse. “But the Scotland Yard/FBI leak shows how simple mistakes can have a huge impact on any operation. Interceptions can be so easy these days.”

Ultimately, Anonymous and LulzSec in particular may have been the victims of their own success and overambition. Whatever the technical mistakes and personal weaknesses that led to their undoing, security experts say their fate was sealed once they became so high profile that authorities made them a priority.

The success of Anonymous in the last two years may also have itself driven greater emphasis on computer security and fuelled demands for regulation – the opposite of their intent.

Even for a global activist community infused with new energy and political significance in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Anonymous remains controversial and divisive.

While some members may be admired for their actions and beliefs – albeit often varied and extreme – others are seen as simply in it for the “lulz”, the plural of the Internet abbreviation LOL for “laugh out loud”.

“There are those who see them as banner carriers for the revolutionary left,” says Beyond Clicktivism’s Hardy. “But there are also those who see them just as consumerists who don’t want to pay (for)… music and videos.”

Reuters