Anonymous hacks Panda Security in response to LulzSec arrests

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/anonymous-hacks-panda-security-in-response-to-lulzsec-arrests/10542

by mck- • 14 years ago

72 28 14 years ago

zdnet.com

olalonde• 14 years ago

It makes me sad to see seemingly talented and well intentioned individuals and go down such a destructive path.

kiba• 14 years ago

Well, they care about the attention and spotlight. Doing good things is secondary or not in your goal at all.

It's all about signaling unless you are seriously genuinely interested in improving humanity's lot, not just feeling good for doing something good. (One way to test that is to do anonymously random act of kindness without being recongnized by the public or anyone)

GB_001• 14 years ago

Thing is, they could be doing random, unknown acts of kindness and you'd still be complaining they want the spotlght. Since they aren't publicized, you wouldn't know if they did.

But yeah, this backlash is pretty childish on both ends.

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

Yeah, imagine all the good Panda Security folks could do if they had chosen differently.

spoiledtechie• 14 years ago

Im going to get voted down for this, but I don't mind.

ZING! haha

stevecalifornia• 14 years ago

How do you down-vote?

Seriously, these 'hackers' could be contributing to the greater good of our civilization by writing tools and methodologies to make network security not so asymmetric in favor of attackers. It's really a shame that they don't see they are hurting real people and doing real damage.

coderdude• 14 years ago

You don't have to be that lazy. You know as well as any other chemically well-balanced individual that two wrongs don't make a right. I can't tell who is doing a better job of feeding the trolls, you or I.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

The borg have lost their qu- leader, so now they go rampant.

sigh

Anon, I love you, but I hate you sometimes.

Indyan• 14 years ago

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675090

Anyways, It will be interesting to see if Anonymous can actually survive the recent Fed strike. Without some sort of a leadership, Anon will descend into chaos due to infighting.

The signs are there even in this attack. Have a look at the press release. Typically, Anonymous press releases are written in hyperbolic, but grammatically correct English. This one seems to written be written by a shabby teenager.

rdl• 14 years ago

I wonder which specific Gibson novel we now live in.

Jimmie• 14 years ago

As apathetic as I am towards anon, lulzsec and hacktivism in general sometimes I can't help pausing and thinking "I live in a would where people are battling digitally. That's fucking cool."

fuzzix• 14 years ago

"I live in a would where people are battling digitally"

The fact that a guy actually named "Dotcom" is public enemy #1 to the old elites, prehaps we are in the midst of some 90s Neal Stephenson whimsy :)

gabaix• 14 years ago

On his Twitter account, CTO Luis Corrons continues taunting Anonymous after the facts.

I don't understand why Panda lets one of his employee behave like this. He looks emotionally involved. He's making those hacker's efforts more visible.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

>On his Twitter account, CTO Luis Corrona continues taunting Anonymous after the facts.

And when it comes to anon, taunting them is quite possibly the dumbest fucking thing you can do. They're just feeding the fire and possibly getting further attacks set up.

Don't feed the troll!

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

When the house is burning, some are dumb enough to pour gas on it.

mc32• 14 years ago

Next time, before they taunt, they should think about setting up a honeypot. I mean, might as well try to get something out of the deal.

chmike2• 14 years ago

Too obvious! It's provocation. Soon or later Anons will make a mistake by getting out of their rabbit holes. These immediate hit back type of reactions is a weak point. In "old Europe" regions, where very old rooted cultural tradition of revenge behavior exist, a long delayed hit back has become the rule by Darwinian evolution process. Biological virus behaving like this with a long incubation delay while keeping their ability to contaminate others are the most harmful.

Anon's justifying their activity with good cause motives doesn't make sense. There are many other ways to act efficiently in favor of these good causes without using dark forces. These strategies have already been proven to be very effective. Consider Martin Luther King, Gandi, Mandela. One single man managed to push empires and systems on their knees and surrender. These people didn't use their fists, weapons or bombs and certainly didn't leverage their cause by terror on harming or killing innocent people.

My impression is that Anons are people who by their skills manage to take control of computers and have, by this, gained power to harm. There is a very thin and fuzzy line between getting control of things (neutral) and acting to harm and justifying it by a good cause.

The feeling one may have when getting such power in our hands make it very easy to fall on the dark force side. The good cause justifications are just tactics to neutralize their own consciousness. The more people they manage to convince by it, the stronger the muzzling of their own consciousness become.

If you take 5 minutes to think about it, you'll understand that there is not much difference with terrorist's rationale. The degree of harm is of course not comparable, but it is the same logical mechanism in play and which is obviously wrong in many ways. It has been proven to be a dead end for terrorists as well as for country leaders. It is just a matter of time.

If someone has truly the desire to act to make this world a better place and contribute to make change what has to change, then there are many more efficient methods that don't require to use dark forces. One of the thing that makes them more efficient is just because of that, they don't use dark force.

polymatter• 14 years ago

"Dark force" is an absolute necessity if anyone is going to take you seriously (unfortunately). MLK and Gandhi (don't know so much about Mandela) both advocated for peace but had powerful contemporaries who did not.

sophacles• 14 years ago

I am not entirely sure why so many people oppose hacktivism to the work of Gandhi, MLK, etc. It isn't the same, but it is much more in the vein of passive resistance than violent protest. First off, lets scope out the acts of civil disobedience here:

The incumbent powers (gov't, companies working for them, etc), have defined a set of rules stating "this stuff is not for you to know, besides we are only doing good, so trust us", but there are acts by them that sure look a lot like abuse of their power, but they don't bother to justify them. They keep stuff secret and carry on despite concerns. So a group of people comes along and decides not to honor the rules about secrecy and instead makes effort to bring information about the questionable actions to light. The civil disobedience here is simply not honoring the rules about secrecy. There is no violence, no one is harmed physically by these acts. There may be financial harm done (almost certainly actually), I am going to agree with that, however defer discussion for a bit.

Let's look at classic passive resistance movements for a moment. They work largely by gatherings of people in demonstration of solidarity, combined with acts of civil disobedience. The rules in place are ignored intentionally, with no physical harm brought by the demonstrators. However, financial harm is a frequent result of this. Sometimes it is just a side effect, such as disruptions of business via protests, or less productivity due to people not working. Other times however, this is an intentional consequence. Yes, MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela all caused intentional financial harm to their opponents. They organized general strikes - preventing business from producing goods and making money. They organized boycotts (denying business revenue). They intentionally arranged demonstrations to cause mass disruption.

So is the financial harm caused by hacktivism terribly different from that caused by other passive resistance? Probably not for the most part. There is the fact that hacking can also be looked at as a form of sabotage - hence my comments on similarity rather than congruence. However sabotage is not black and white... other forms of sabotage which are considered OK in passive resistance movements include work slowdowns, poor quality control, and so on. This is a bit I need to think on more, but I don't feel it throws a wrench into my argument ( :) ).

Finally a big component of many passive resistance movements is publicly outing those who work against them. This may not be organized by the central organizers, but it happens, and is considered a big driving force of the movements. Think about the anti-Vietnam protests and the investigative journalism which fueled them (e.g. the pentagon papers). These information leakages are always protested by the incumbents with the same cries of "harm" and "danger" and "secret violation".

All that said, I must disclaim here: I am not taking a stance on the actions or politics of Anonymous or Lulzsec. Just pointing out that on a "passive resistance - terrorism" scale, hacktivism is still pretty left of the middle ground.

einhverfr• 14 years ago

So the interesting question is what next?

The feds have arrested five individuals associated with Anonymous. Anonymous struck back, albeit in a somewhat childish way, reminding me of the KFC bombing in Jakarta in response to ABB's trial (not well planned, ad hoc attack which was both visible and largely ineffective at causing real damage).

Will Anonymous be able to recover, and carry out other high profile hactivism attacks? Or will they degenerate into more of what we see here?

I am not trying to draw moral equivalencies here. However, it seems that when looking at social positions relative to law enforcement, that's the closest parallel that comes to my mind at least in my experience.

syaz1• 14 years ago

>Anonymous struck back, albeit in a somewhat childish way,

According to the article, Anon claimed Panda Sec helped jail 25 anons. How is that childish, purely from target perspective? It's either Law Enforcers, or their affiliates.

yaix• 14 years ago

We should be careful to not mix Anonymous with other groups that use actual physical violence in order to generate fear to destroy societies. Comparing the Jakarte bombings with a simple server break-in is totally out of place.

andybak• 14 years ago

"I am not trying to draw moral equivalencies here"

Well - like it or not that's how it comes across and I personally find your comparison extremely distasteful.

TheCapn• 14 years ago

Pastebin from the attack: http://pastebin.com/LM9vdNWy

Some interesting data on there...

Si prefieres LogMeIn Free: https://secure.logmein.com/ Login: PSISuport@pandasecurity.com Contraseña: panda01

...

El login de Windows, puedes usar cualquiera de los nuestros Usuario: nombre.apellido Password: Panda12345

Secure? Not so much.

As big as this might be for Anon I'm afraid they must've just guessed at passwords if that is the form of password security they used.

The root passwords were more secure but I'm willing to bet that the Windows logon(s) provided above had a file somewhere (Desktop perhaps) with the passwords in plain view. PasswordSafe or the like may have been used but chances are it had a password of similar strength to those above.

Anonymous hacks Panda Security in response to LulzSec arrests

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