Anonymous Under Civil War? 301
Stoobalou writes "Civil war appears to have broken out in the ranks of headless 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous, with claims that a rogue admin has seized control of two key sites used to coordinate the loose-knit group's online direct action. The news follows speculation that a breakaway group of Anonymous members was responsible for the hacking attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Online Entertainment Network, which saw personal information, including credit card details, stolen from as many as 100 million users' accounts."
Yes it is (Score:1, Interesting)
Anonymous is rock and roll (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in a conservative Christian household so I got the full scare story on the ebils of rock and roll before I dipped my toe in the other side. From the Christian POV, rock is monolithic. There's the titular head represented by Satan who is coordinating everything in a top-down hierarchical fashion from AC/DC, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper on down to the Beatles and Pat Boone. Even the most banal, lite rock-friendly artist is promoting Satan's message of substance abuse, loose morals, easy sex and enjoyment of life. Drug messages are backmasked into the music. Sex permeates the videos. Album jackets and psychedelic posters all have their hidden symbols and meanings; it's fun to take a trip, put acid in your veins. (supernaut!)
Then you look at it from the other side and shit, it's just a business. Rebellion is popular so you package it, commoditize it and sell it. Satan has nothing to do with it unless that's just a personal nickname for soulless assholes in suits. You really think it takes a prince of darkness to sell people on the idea of having fun and getting laid? Puhleeeeeeeeaze. Some rocker can declare he's doing something in the name of rock and roll, critics can argue about what rock is, how it should be, but they're all just tossing ideas into the collective memetic cess pool. There's no ecumenical councils trying to establish rock orthodoxy, no pope of rock to excommunicate you if you aren't doing it right.
It's the same thing with Anonymous. There's a vague, poorly expressed ideal with everyone supporting their own irreconcilable interpretation of it. You can't really have a civil war amongst people who were never unified to begin with. That's making the fundamental mistake of assuming Anonymous is top-down, hierarchical, and organized. Organized anarchy? That's as oxymoronic as Christian rock.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
>Most assuredly, you can kill anonymous
No you can't. As soon as anyone does something mischievous online and claims to be anonymous, there it is. All this talk of anon being a group is balls - those who claim to lead or direct it are self-nominated, and are no more representative that those idiot thirteen-year-olds in V masks that keep cropping up on YouTube.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like when crackers hang out on IRC they freely share every exploit available to them. They hoard the secrets, share when it's advantageous or trade when someone has something they want. There's always 'something' out there waiting to be hacked. Especially if you're using off the shelf forum, services, or linux distros.
Also, it's a lot easier to preach being secure than it is to actually be secure. Since for anonymous to function without everyone getting clinked up in FPYITA prison they're missing out on the whole 'authentication' part of authorization how secure can anything be? You authenticate that I'm the fake person I say I am? Great. That'll do you a lot of good.
So thats how. There's no such thing as hack-proof, and really, no such thing as anonymity. The FBI is probably monitoring the 'interesting' parts of anonymous and will kick down doors en mass in 6 months or a year after they've rooted out who's a teenager and who's actually a foreign agent. (Sorry teenagers, your doors will be kicked down too, tough lesson but you know not what you do..)
Consider this: If you were part of an foreign agency intent on disrupting American commerce (or committing crime) - wouldn't it be easier to just infiltrate anonymous and rile them up to go attack targets to spread cyberterrorism investigators thinner so that your agency could conduct their activity with that much less attention?
The non-car analogy would be calling in a bunch of fake 911 calls on the east side of town 30 minutes before you rob a bank on the west side.