Op Blackout - Anonymous pins down FBI and Justice Dept websites

<== Operation Blackout ==>

After one of the most popular file hoster Megaupload goes down following the US Department of Justice's indiction of 7 people who ran it, Anonymous strikes back !

Indeed, the Megaupload 7 were tracked down the day after the Blackout of Wikipedia and other major websites happended in protest against SOPA and PIPA, two internet piracy bills to be passed in congress.

The Retaliation

Only 15 minutes after the indictment, The Black Hat Hacktivist group Anonymous launches a Massive DOS attack  against 10 websites. Among those who became completely out of service are:

=> The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

=> The US Department of Justice

=> Universal Music Group

=> Recording Industry Association of America

=> Motion Picture Association of America

The Distributed Denial of Service
(DDOS) Attack 

Anonymous is a collective group of hackers who come from different geographical locations but work together against designated targets. In this event, they communicated details of their target through their IRC channel #AnonOps. You can find more information on Anonymous group's operations and even tutorials on setting up softwares and required communication channels in order to help in their cause here:

Anonymous Hacker Group Website

The Software = ???

So you might be thinking..what the heck did those guys use to put down FBI's fucking website ???
The answer is LOIC => Low Orbit Ion Cannon. 

LOIC is DOS applications developed to put enormous load on a target by continuously pining it. Used by thousands it becomes an effective DDOS which can put most servers down. An Anonymous rep sais that more than 5k users downloaded and used LOIC to flood the target websites.

Download LOIC

Anonymous Message - Don't Mess With Us

The secret to their Firepower

LOIC was initially a manually operated piece of software, but it eventually evolved and transformed itself into one which can be remotely operated. The LOIC program link that spreads across Anonymous's network is one which has been modified. It indeed can be pointed at an internet relay chat server and then be controlled by the Anon Admins to use your PC and internet connection to launch attack against the targets. So basically when installing the application, you become part of a botnet..the Anonymous Botnet and you give hackes the power to control your computer. That's their firepower..and considering the enormous amount of downloads that software has received..they got a lot of it !!!

XerXeS DoS - Wikileaks Hacking Tool

XerXes 

DoS Attack Video Part 2

The Hacking tool used to DoS Wikileaks

This is demonstration of a XerXes DoS Attack in action against atahadi.com

Whats new from the first demo video is that more is revealed about the attack technique.

See for yourself :

Activate FullScreen for a better experience 

Click on this link to view the first video

This second video of XerXeS shows more of the XerXeS dashboard, and reveals even more about the attack technique – It's an Enhanced version of XerXes able to dos secured Apache servers !

Take a look at 02.25 when he sets up the target server:

XerXes can now affect multiple server flavors – some still more are under development. 

This time he dropped a Secured server which is supposed have the Apache setup that is impervious to a XerXeS hit.  

Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

The basic premise to this attack is that by sending (but never fully completing) numerous requests to Apache, one could get the Apache process to consume all system resources and stop serving up the actual web content.  

Exploitation

The Apache vulnerability is only the beginning, Xerxes will be able to hit IIS in the future. 

DoS or DDoS ? 

The attack is performed on a single low-spec computer, and while The Jester sends relatively few packets from his own machine, the attack results in brief outages of the target site. 

So he is not using any intermediaries or botnets, sorry for having wrote DDoS in my first post xD

You can view part 1 here: XerXes in action

You surely can follow Jester here:

http://twitter.com/th3j35t3r

Hackers attack Mastercard

OPERATION PAYBACK

If you tried going to MasterCard’s web site this morning you might have found yourself waiting a long time. Hackvists Hackers supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claim to have taken down the website of MasterCard, which shutdown its payment service to the controversial website on Monday. 

The hacktivist group dubbed Anon_Operation said in one tweet that "www.mastercard.com/ is down" and designated mastercard.com as their "current target" in what was taking the proportions of cyber war.

WikiLeaks has benefited from a massive groundswell of online support. Twitter is choked with messages of solidarity. The site's Facebook page has 1 million fans. And tech-savvy supporters are organizing boycotts and other stunts.  

 Operation:Payback occurs after the credit-card company withdrew its funding services for WikiLeaks. The whistleblower Web site’s founder Julian Assange was arrested yesterday and denied bail. He remains in the custody of British police.

View our previous post to see Xerxes, the tool used to ddos Wikileak, in action. A tool able to make a distributed denial of service attack, created by the jester...

Wikileak Xerxes Dos Attack

Want to have a look at the tools which Jester (the one who did a Ddos distributed denial of service) attack against Wikileaks ? Here you go :

Xerxes in Action

The tool used to Ddos Wikileak

Activate FullScreen for a better experience xD
and
View the preceding post to get the full story xD