Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Time to double-check security

The lawless, depraved group called "Anonymous" appears to be planning to disrupt the lives of law-abiding computer users and companies. According to the Department of Homeland Security,
Anonymous has stated publicly that the tool will be ready for wider use by the group in September 2011. But though there have been several publicly available tools that claim to be versions of #RefRef, so far it's unclear "what the true capabilities of #RefRef are.

The tool appears to trick a web server into conducting a denial of service attack against itself. The key dates associated with this threat are September 17, 2011 (called Occupy Wall Street), November 11, 2011 (Operation Facebook, targeting the site alleged privacy violations), and December 21, 2012 (Project Mayhem).

The juvenile motivations - as betrayed by the names and dates of these threats - tell us that these are immature, selfish and narcissistic people who no doubt believe that they are justified in causing financial harm to their targets. We must nevertheless be on notice that these threats are real.

Credit where its due: DHS Warns of Attacks