

Anonymous Protests Aaron Swartz's Death By Twice Hacking A U.S. Gov't Website - xijuan
http://www.fastcompany.com/3005118/anonymous-protests-aaron-swartzs-death-twice-hacking-us-govt-website

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moccajoghurt
I guess you could call something like that "cyber terrorism". Anonymous is
spreading their opinion about a political issue by destroying stuff.

This is not changing anything. Do they really believe they are helping?

I can't even tell what they are trying to achieve. Are they trying to impress
the masses by showing what they are capable of? In that case you could compare
their "activism" with the defaces script-kiddies do on random websites.

I guess some people who act under the name of Anonymous have good intentions
but the vast majority doesn't.

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notdrunkatall
You certainly could call it cyber-terrorism, which is why I vehemently
disagree with ineffective measures such as these. They accomplish nothing
except to give the government ammunition to use in the fight to expand its
scope and power over online activities in the name of fighting some new, vague
threat.

Anonymous, you're wasting your goodwill on this bullshit, and in the end,
you're almost certainly just hurting all of us. Just stop it.

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kaybe
Terrorism as a word is far too strong here. It rather falls into the area of
vandalism, I'd say.

Or are you feeling terror at the thought of a website defacement? The use of
"terrorism" is quite inflationary these days, just as "war against.." was
before. We have to take care, this can easily lead to more 'anti-terrorism
measures', since there is so much more 'terrorism' (because all kinds of
'terrorism' are unquestionably horrible!). (I'm not saying there is no
terrorism, but.. let's just be careful how we use the word.)

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hawleyal
Agreed.

Equivalent of spray-painting over a billboard.

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jiggy2011
I don't understand how the gov't websites are so easy to hack, unless they
have someone on the inside?

I'm guessing they are not just running old wordpress etc and getting owned by
out of the box exploits.

So it must be custom exploits written for each site, so unless they have a
copy of the server-side code to fuzz offline the admins are going to notice a
lot of very weird traffic which will clue them that something is up.

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throwaway2048
you are massively overestimating the competence of various departments IT
deployments. Stuff like the department of justice isnt the NSA/CIA, exploiting
CMS misconfiguration and holes works for government sites just like it does
anywhere else.

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jahewson
Given that the public outcry over Schwartz's prosecution has been enormous,
this action is unproductive. The real damage being done here is to the image
of the young computer-savvy male.

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dutchbrit
Protesting in real life, on the streets, now that'd be better.

