03.08, 23:13 Attorney General Eric Holder announced this morning that 72 individuals have been charged with being linked to a massive child pornography ring started in Louisiana and spreading across five continents and 13 countries.
28.10, 20:53 With wounded veteran Scott Olsen unable to speak following an assault from police during a raid on Occupy Oakland earlier this week, thousands of Americans across the country are lending their voice to the movement to do the talking for the hero.
Occupy Wall Street
18.10, 20:42 In the days before President Obama approved American-led airstrikes in Libya without congressional go-ahead, the White House considered using cyberwarfare to attempt to crush the army of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Libyan conflict Osama Bin Laden killed
29.07, 23:44 Ex-DEA Investigator, Scott James Whitcomb, was sentenced to 25 years in a federal penitentiary for producing child porn videos.
13.10, 19:36 Some people go online for sports scores; others log on to check email. Military personnel with the US Air Force, however, recently used the Web to learn that their controversial and exuberantly expensive drone fleet had been hacked.
16.08, 19:39 As many as 100 protestors in San Francisco, California successfully closed down four subway stations in the city’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system yesterday, signaling the latest bout in a battle between activists and the San Fran transit cops.
26.07, 20:13 If your position at Homeland Security requires you to keep cyber attacks at a minimum, you might not have been doing your job justice as of late.
Published: 03 November, 2011, 21:02
Anonymous takes on pedophiles or somethigTAGS: Children, Crime, Scandal, Sex, Internet, Information Technology, USA, Photography, Culture Anonymous moved from targeting Wall Street, corrupt governments and corporate sites last month. The latest attack from the hacking collective rather was directed at an unaware group that navigated the web for child porn assumingly undetected.
Throughout October, Anonymous waged a war against online child pornography under the name of OpDarkNet. The crusade pinned the hacktivists against the web servers and users of sites such as Lolita City and Hard Candy, where patrons trade graphic images of sexually exploited children. With a series of attacks, Anonymous managed to infiltrate the message board forums of the illegal sites and flood the pages with malicious material. For their grand finale, however, Anonymous managed to trick the kiddie porn fanatics into downloading a plug-in that reported their every move.
To navigate the dark underbelly of the Internet — a place where drugs and guns and porn and, well, everything is made available — web surfers must cloak their identity with special software that covers up footsteps. Tor, a program that is easy to use and does just that has become a favorite for people stumbling upon the Internet’s vast and often unreported black market, and Anonymous was well aware of it. Knowing that an update for the program is on the horizon, hackers coded an update for Tor that they knew the patrons of the porn sites would race to download.
What Anonymous made though didn’t do as advertised.
For 24 hours, Anonymous was able to track every online move of anyone that was using their fake Tor update. “The purpose of #OpDarknet was to collect evidence and prove that [one percent] of Tor users who use Tor for [Child Pornography] are the ones causing the problems for the rest of the Tor community, the 99%,” reads a post from Anonymous dated November 2. In their ambush, which they consider a “social experiment,” Anonymous managed to track down the IP addresses and histories of 190 users of the shady underground Internet.
After collecting the info, Anonymous made the material available to the Web and retired from their Dark Net operation. From here, they say, it’s up to authorities to decide what to do with it.
"They'll take forever… due process for some of these guys are so weak," one hacker told a reporter for Gawker. "The best way for Law Enforcement to react is for us to release it. They can chose to follow or not."
Should authorities chose to use Anonymous’ groundwork to open up an investigation, all the material is now readily available for them. Detailed descriptions of how the project was planned, carried out and even authorized with the approval of Mozilla, the company behind the popular FireFox browser, are now available through the hacktivists.
In a statement, Anonymous that the last strike in OpDarkNet was to avenge those that were using Tor for evil when it actually can be a crucial tool to some people. While “the one percent” of users operate under Tor’s cloak for child pornography, says Anonymous, the rest of the users work through it for good. “The rest, 99% consists of Chinese/Iran journalists, Government intelligence fighting a secret war with Al-Qaeda, and us Anons who believe in the right to Free Speech,” says Anonymous.
For the 190 users of the fake Tor that have their tracks now exposed online, Anonymous says that they have forwarded the material to both Interpol and the FBI. Political site NewEurope adds that an official with the European Commission says that authorities are aware of Anonymous’ operation.
So what do the pedophiles do while they await a knock on the door from investigators at 4 in the morning?
“You should consider running anti-virus/malware programs and/or fully wiping your hard drives,” cautions an administrator on the Hard Candy forum.
"If you were stupid enough to install the recently linked Tor button 'update'… then your anonymity has no doubt been compromised.”
03.11, 19:54 A third woman in less than a week has come forth with allegations that GOP candidate Herman Cain exhibited unwanted behavior towards her in the past.
US Election 2012
03.11, 21:56 The White House is outraged today and says a request from Congress to hand-over emails pertaining to the massive loan the Obama administration okayed for Solyndra shortly before the solar panel plant went bankrupt is unprecedented.
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