Sitting on the airplane the other day and I was bored out of my mind so I picked up the in-flight magazine (US-Air) and started thumbing through to pass the time when I found an interesting article about information security. One of the conclusions astounded me.
Based on this, I am left with the conclusion that diapers might hold the key to success.
Network World has an interesting article on cloud providers. Turns out, the largest cloud services provider is, in fact, the criminals, and botnets.
What a great name for an anti-government operation…
Anonymous Unfurls ‘Operation Titstorm’: ”
Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group Anonymous unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship.
The group, which previously brought down Scientology’s websites has also undertaken a host of other online pranks. It dubbed the new attack ‘Operation Titstorm’ to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography that uses adult actors if they appear underage. Violent material targeting children is also to be censored.
Anonymous’ past targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi webcaster. The group sent Australian media e-mail messages warning of the attack, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
‘No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be unwanted,’ the e-mail said. ‘The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.’
At one point Thursday, parliament’s website was felled after getting 7.5 million hits a second. Usually, it receives a few hundred a second.
Flyers seeking recruits for Wednesday’s barrage said the group would follow the service attack with ‘a shitstorm of porn e-mail, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices.’
(Via Wired: Threat Level.)
So it appears that the “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” has apparently impacted somewhere between 20 and 34 large companies; including Google.
The initial post from Google last night.
Then, just moments later, Adobe released a very similarly-worded announcement stating that they had also been a victim of an attack as well.
Then, sort of an update, from Google with some additional snippets of information:
There appears to be a lack of clarity as to how pervasive this attack really was. For instance, the post on Google’s blog last night states the number “20″. A Bloomberg.com post stated this morning that there were 34 companies involved. Either way, the number of companies involved is mind-boggling.
Some additional commentary:
Evgeny Morozov has a great post/analysis over on Foreign Policy. I am not so sure I can come to the same conclusion given that he presupposes that China’s reaction to Google’s statement will be to simply shut Google.cn off. It may not come down quite like that.
Robert McMillan from IDG had great coverage that was carried in multiple places, like this article on PCWorld.
But I think the most telling snippet out of all of this is the statement issued by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, on the US Department of State website here. The reason I think this is the most telling is because the fact that the Secretary of State issues a statement basically saying to China “you’d better have a really really good explanation for this” is remarkable given the current state of the economic relationship between China and the US (I am going to refrain from providing my opinion on this). You don’t see something like this every day.
Finally, as a resource you might want to consider, Tim Mullen re-shared his informative article on how to block access to an entire country using Microsoft’s ISA server, on Full-Disclosure this afternoon.
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