You'll never work in this industry again - AST 1997
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Hacker army will invade British Government servers
THE LEGIONS of hackers who are currently attacking any organisation that does not back their call to free Wikileaks front man Julian Assange have threatened the UK government.
The hacker collective called Anonymous has said that it will target British government websites if Assange is extradited to Sweden, where he is wanted over allegations of sexual assault.
The outfit has already bought down Mastercard, Visa and the Swedish government with millions of bogus visits under what it calls "Operation Payback". They also attempted to bring down Paypal but only managed to undermine its blog.
Paypal and the credit card companies had announced that they would no longer process donations to Assange's whistleblowing outfit Wikileaks.
Gregg Housh, an American Internet activist who worked with the hackers told the Daily Telegraph that the hackers will go after the weakest links, because they want to see results.
Assange is due to appear before the City of Westminster magistrate's court next week and his lawyers will again attempt to secure his release on bail. The chances of him getting it are somewhat light.
He has been accused by two women of one count of rape, two of sexual molestation and one of unlawful coercion. He denies the allegations and says that the sex was consensual.
The attacks the UK government faces are almost certainly going to be distributed denial of service attacks. µ
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I'm sure they could spoof being millions of shops putting through payment transaction requests from customers. Enough to cause a slow down of the payments system.
The websites are mostly corporate nonsense, except for the shop-front websites like Amazon etc. It's the money flow system that is a more valuable target, plus the networks that host and process the payment systems.
The servers worth attacking in UK would be road tax, TAX and other systems for collecting mass money transactions. Those are also going to be low on the public's sympathy list, in fact quite a few people would probably chuckle!
However, there are 2 things going on here. 1 is a site publishing leaks (or links to a download of leaks) and the other thing is Julian Assange's private life.
Are the charges against him "only" of "the condom broke"? What is "sex with surprise"? Did the "victim" really go and buy grocerys afterwards and cook for him? Is it more than this, does he have a history of "rape" or of being an "asshole jerk"?
The Inq, please can you find out the full "charges" or reason for "request for witness questioning" and publish it?
Anonymous are mostly a bunch of script kiddies - they couldn't hack a hole in a cardboard box. Yesterday's attack on Amazon was a fiasco which achieved nothing; now that organisations are aware of the threat from LOIC, it's not all that hard to counter.
That's until someone comes up with anything more effective than LOIC anyway...
I doubt that the hacks will get very far. Chances are that the servers that are connected directly to the internet most likely do not host sensitive information/data, and that the ones that do host the sensitive stuff are probably on a closed network with no internet access.
If that is true, the worst that they could do is just hack the public server and deface the websites.
If "Anonymous" was providing computer resources directly to keep WikiLeaks material online and to distribute it to interested people (do NOT e-mail the original documents to ME), I'd respect that.
If they were countering the denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks, I'd give them respect.
As it is, I think that probably we are seeing government-ordered hacking in action against WikiLeaks' reputation as well as its online presence. The same people may be carrying out both sets of attacks.
By the way, the U.S. military and diplomatic material released by WikiLeaks is substantially not the truth. It is what military and diplomatic people working for America chose to say, which is very far from the same thing. If somebody asserted that Pakistan's security forces were or are in league with the enemy, that does not mean that it was true.
On the other hand, it becomes embarrassingly visible that American diplomatic representation is dominated by people who have done the President a favour and in return they want to live in a nice house abroad for free for a while, but have no other particular recommendation. It's been that way for a long time. So it's likely that any one U.S. ambassador is, in terms of qualification for the job, a bozo.
And also that even the more ethically principled U.S. executive branch of government, if you think that's what we're looking at, regards the rest of the world (except for Israel) as its consumable resource, plaything, and cattle.
We've also heard elsewhere a plausible report that the U.S. President is qualified to order and have performed the assassination of anyone on Earth, probably excluding most of his own country's citizens: so when you woke up this morning, at an address that is known, it's because President Obama personally decided not to have you killed yesterday, but to allow you to live. The same goes for Julian Assange and for Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in respect of whom the President's ears must be burning. It was on The Daily Show so it must be true.
A more indepth view to the charges. as you will see there is no mention of assange 'forcing himself' or using his body weight to keep anyone down.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/12/sex-charges-and-arrest-warrant-against.html
I took the info regarding the charges from the following link.
http://www.businessinsider.com/julian-assange-sex-crimes-2010-12
they can be corroborated from other news sources less governemnetally affiliated.
although it's true the charges would probably only be valid is sweden you description is not correct and does not correlate to the charges, which are such things as 'not using a condom when asked and assured' and 'holding a woman down with his bodyweight against her wishes' (says the BBC site)
I'm not sure who came with the 'broken condom' twist but it's not part of the charges AFAIK.
Why it's so hard to get precise info on the charges is also a bit of a mystery though.
It's rather disengenuous that media organisations constantly refer to the alleged crim as a sexual assualt. The crime in question (if i'm not very much mistaken) relates to a broken condom that happened during consentual sex. She maintains it was on person he maintains it was an accident, either way whilst the crime is labelled sex assault under Swedish law it hardly ranks as such in real terms. Hardly worth having interpol chase mr Assange halfway across Europe I think most would agree?