

Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed Hackers’ IP Addresses - omfut
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/05/09/mutiny-within-anonymous-may-have-exposed-hackers-ip-addresses/

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SwellJoe
"Mutiny" has no meaning when there is no authority to which one can object. I
don't know what the right word would be here, but it's definitely not
"mutiny".

I also strongly suspect no one of any significance in this story is
particularly worried about this exposure. Anyone smart who is participating in
potentially illegal activities would be particularly careful about using
proxies for sensitive work; and planning is definitely sensitive. I would also
assume, were I a participant in Anonymous activities, that any site claiming
to be representative of Anonymous has at least a 50% chance of being operated
by the FBI or a rogue security company running black hat operations along the
lines of HB Gary Federal. It'd be absolutely foolish to connect to such a site
directly, and the members of Anonymous who are doing the real heavy lifting
are probably not fools.

~~~
hugh3
_Anyone smart who is participating in potentially illegal activities would be
particularly careful about using proxies for sensitive work; and planning is
definitely sensitive_

I'm not sure why you assume they're smart. Most of 'em are probably about
fifteen years old.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'll quote another bit of what I said: _the members of Anonymous who are doing
the real heavy lifting are probably not fools_.

Anonymous is anybody that wants to be Anonymous, including people who have
never been Anonymous in the past and will never be Anonymous in the
future...but, quite a bit of what Anonymous has done required specialized
knowledge and experience and intelligence. Those are the people the FBI would
like to identify, and they're also the people least likely to be identified by
a data leak like this. So, a leak of Anonymous IP addresses is really probably
a leak of kids who haven't actually done much damage and a handful of Tor exit
node addresses representing the people within Anonymous who know how to wreak
havoc.

That's part of the strength of Anonymous. If there is a crackdown of any sort,
it will snare a bunch of innocent (or close enough to innocent) kids, and miss
all of the real targets completely. Law enforcement could only pin the blame
on dumb 15 year olds so many times before it begins to seem ridiculous
(especially since if they claimed to "take down" Anonymous by doing so,
there'd be a slew of attacks by Anonymous just to prove no such thing had
taken place and the people they'd arrested were innocent bystanders).

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marshray
Seems likely there's more going on here than meets the eye. Somebody's playing
games. Either:

1\. Anonymous does, in fact, have enough of a centralized leadership that they
can pull off this kind of thing as an attention-getting disinformation tactic.

2\. This "rogue admin" is working with the feds as part of some kind of deal.
By releasing some info they get some people to panic, drop their defenses,
generate chatter, and then they observe who's talking to whom and who's wiping
their disks.

3\. What do you know? Anarchists have their power struggles too. Anonymous may
fail to maintain enough of an identity to remain relevant.

4\. All of the above.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Yup, exactly. I'm absolutely ASTOUNDED it took this long for at least a
portion of anon to start festering from within.

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p4bl0
> Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed A Very Few Hackers And A Lot Of
> Scriptkiddies' IP Addresses.

FTFY. (And true hackers would have been behind proxies or using a public wifi
network anyway).

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ryoshu
I would be especially concerned about the 127.0.0.1 addresses listed.

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awakeasleep
Better a visible internal betrayal than a long datasuck by an "Advanced
Persistent Threat"

The whole Anonymous thing was getting a little too big, IMO, and needed
something like this to fragment it and make the kids involved start thinking
about the rest of their lives. I hope a few well meaning but naieve people
quit while they're ahead, wipe their disks, and realize that some government
agency has probably been tracking them down for a while & that this is a
blessing in disguise.

~~~
count
Why do you assume they're kids? Or that they haven't already been living their
life?

~~~
awakeasleep
You're assuming I'm assuming about the whole group.

My statement was about people who have involved themselves with this who are
kids. We've seen pictures of who the FBI rounded up.

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bxr
>several of the group’s sites had been hacked in a coup d’etat by an
administrator who decided that he didn’t like the leaderless command structure
that AnonOps Network Admins use.

Thats poor planning. A coup doesn't work within an structure where the only
authority is whoever you feel like going along with today. Then again
anonymous is a train-wreck happening again and again powered only by internet
drama, so I can't say I'm surprised.

