Distributed denial of service attacks, of the kind pro-WikiLeaks hacktivists have been aiming at PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard, are not particularly complex to pull off. You need a lot of individual computers sending server requests to the site in question, enough to overload the site. The hacktivists have been using Twitter to coordinate those attacks. And Twitter, it seems, may have been trying to shut them down.
According to tweets, accounts named @Anon_Operation and @AnonOperation went down yesterday. (“Anonymous” is the name of the underground organization leading the DDoS attacks.) They currently appear to be back up. New accounts have emerged to replace them, including variations on their spelling, like @Anon_Operations and @Anon_Operationn, as well as ones with names like @Op_Payback and @AnonOpsNet.
The accounts are letting the thousands of hactivists around the world know which site is the target of choice at the moment. Since...
According to tweets, accounts named @Anon_Operation and @AnonOperation went down yesterday. (“Anonymous” is the name of the underground organization leading the DDoS attacks.) They currently appear to be back up. New accounts have emerged to replace them, including variations on their spelling, like @Anon_Operations and @Anon_Operationn, as well as ones with names like @Op_Payback and @AnonOpsNet.
The accounts are letting the thousands of hactivists around the world know which site is the target of choice at the moment. Since...
- 12/9/2010
- by E.B. Boyd
- Fast Company
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