Civil disobedience – intentionally breaking the law as a form of protest – has a proud place in United States history, most notably during the Civil Rights protests. We merely take up bandwidth and system resources like the seats at the Woolworth’s lunch counter.”Īnonymous’s appeal to history is seductive, but ultimately misleading. Our attacks do no damage to the computer hardware. We are using the LOIC to conduct distributed denial of service attacks against businesses that have aided in the censorship of any person. A LOIC-supported attack might subject thousands of people who don’t properly know what a DDoS is, and who believe they are simply making a statement, to felony charges under the CFAA.Īnonymous released an open letter on Thursday titled A Letter from Anonymous: Our Message, Intentions, and Potential Targets, comparing itself to the Greensboro Four:ĭuring the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, access to many businesses was blocked as a peaceful protest against segregation. Therefore, any user participating in a DDoS attack using LOIC is probably guilty of violating the CFAA, no matter how ineffectual his individual contribution to the attack. The CFAA criminalizes not only compromising a computer, but also attempts and conspiracies to engage in such behavior. Similar statutes exist in other countries, most notably the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. A DDoS attack, however, will usually violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and could, for a first conviction, carry a sentence of up to ten years imprisonment. It was developed as a stress-testing tool for network managers and has legitimate diagnostic uses. The brunt of these DDoS attacks is probably coming from Anonymous’s own botnets (which have executed attacks of this scale in the past), with LOIC serving as a PR tool to create the appearance of a mass movement. DDoS attacks typically require tens of thousands of machines or more to successfully disrupt a large-scale commercial site. There is no reason to believe that more than a few thousand people have actually used LOIC to help Anonymous. The use of LOIC is probably only symbolic. LOIC’s simplicity and availability allow anyone, even without any specialized computer knowledge, to participate in a DDoS with only a few clicks of the mouse.
LOIC DDOS DOWNLOAD
LOIC is available for download on computers and on the iPhone, and is even available through a JavaScript applet online. Anonymous encouraged ordinary Internet users to download a program called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), which launches a small-scale denial-of-service-like request from the user’s machine, and use it at the same time Anonymous launched its own attacks. These attacks are unique, however, in that Anonymous apparently supplemented its own DDoS capabilities with volunteers. (It is more likely that the attack on Amazon simply failed.) These recent attacks, says Anonymous, are retaliation against groups that have helped to suppress WikiLeaks.
Anonymous also claims to have launched attacks against the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the Swiss Post Bank, as well as an attack on Amazon that it claims to have aborted. DDoS attacks rely on “botnets” of compromised computers to overload a server with phony requests, interrupting the server’s ability to process real requests.Īnonymous, a self-styled cyberactivist movement (sometimes called “hacktivists”) best known for launching cyberattacks on the Church of Scientology, took credit for the attacks. In the past week, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been launched against MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal in the wake of their refusing to service payments to the controversial site WikiLeaks. How is MasterCard like the Greensboro Woolworth’s? The diffuse Internet group Anonymous would have you believe they are very alike.
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