Y'know, back in prehistory when we started speculating about cyberwar, I never really anticipated the, I don't know, the sordidness of a group of anonymized schoolyard bullies being totally schooled by an 11-year-old girl, then using what in prehistoric terms would basically be magic to find her somewhere in the world, then targeting a gossip site in utter flaming outrage that this was noticed and commented on.
Weren't we supposed to be flying PanAm to the space station by now and making vidphone calls to important business clients? I seem to have gotten the wrong future.
Shouldn't that by "...under successful attack by 4chan users" ("under attack by anonymous" isn't journalistic enough, even for Village Voice)? I don't think "4chan" the site officially endorses the attack.
Is this because of gawker's criticism of the "You don goofed?" affair? Jessi Slaughter, the face that launched a thousand rootkits.
They're basically dealing with a bunch of 17-and-under kids who think like this (quoted from the link): "4 chan it's not about hacking it's about the fact that Gawker begged for this fight for 3 or 4 days. They know who we are. They know our numbers. Or rather, evidently they didn't. They called us out and we took them up on it after being the bigger man. How is that pussy? They begged for it. We took the high road. Then they just pushed a bit too far. You fuck with the bull you get the horns."
Somehow they can't see how lame this makes them look? They think they're some kind of force to be reckoned with and not just a bunch of lame script kiddies, but they never come off as the former and always as the latter.
I sometimes browse the /b/ board on 4chan. I find it a good "shock" to know at what lows human beings can go. But I would not advise it, because it's something for people with a strong stomach.
What I learnt is that they absolutely don't care how lame they look. It's a strange subculture, where everybody insults everyone, hating everything and being as mean as they can be. But still, in cases like this one, they manage to come up as a whole in the name of Anonymous.
I think this is a fertile ground for some psychological and sociological study.
I do not think they control a botnet- they download that LOIC tool individually, specifically for DDoS purpose. Gawker does not seem to have a serious infrastructure: it looks like they are hosted on DATAGRAM.COM, they do not even have their own IP ranges. So it's probably easy to knock down.
I don't have any respect for people that use Windows-based attack tools, not that I respected 4chan anyways. Windows limits parallel connections, making it pretty much useless for "packeting".
4chan is full of a bunch of 12 year old script kiddies. They don't even know what a buffer overflow is and they think HTML is a programming language.
You don't really need parallel connections when you have a thousand or /b/tards all running the LOIC. That's sufficient to take down medium-sized web properties for short periods of time.
They certainly are script kiddies, but they're not as ignorant as you portray them either.
It's the power of ignorant morons in vast numbers. Kind of like the idiots who loot, riot, and burn cars after sporting events. In both cases, the damage caused isn't a reflection of the power or intellect of those causing the damage. Just a reflection of their sheer numbers and lack of common decency.
The last time I visisted, ~20% of the posts on /b/ were malware, botnets, and various other goodies to probe. 4chan users basically use their own community to attack sites. There's self-servicing ddos web apps/downloads and the infected, uneducated browsers of the site. Its actually quite ironic to see an user utilize their own internet connection in an organized DDOS, eh?
Its not too far-fetched too imagine a certain percentage of their community also has some type of access to botnets to assist in attacks.. I mean that's what they do, sometimes, so, why not be prepared?
Weren't we supposed to be flying PanAm to the space station by now and making vidphone calls to important business clients? I seem to have gotten the wrong future.