[ISN] Operation Global Blackout: Real danger or irrelevant?

http://www.csoonline.com/article/703056/operation-global-blackout-real-danger-or-irrelevant-

By Taylor Armerding
CSO
March 28, 2012

Will the hacker group Anonymous make good on its threat to take down the 
Internet Saturday? Probably not. But it could slow it down, according to 
a number of security experts. And it may depend in part on how unified 
Anonymous is about the attack -- there are some indications of divisions 
within the group.

Anonymous has threatened retaliation for the arrests of about 25 of its 
members last month, and is also focused on what its members believe is a 
continuing threat by Congress to censor the Internet through revised 
versions of the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the companion Senate 
bill called the Protect IP Act (PIPA), even though the legislation was 
put on hold in January.

And it is essentially daring anyone to stop Operation Global Blackout -- 
the group announced March 31 as the date of the attack, along with the 
method they intend to use -- disabling the Domain Name Service through 
distributed denial of service attacks on the root servers of the DNS 
with an attack tool called "ramp," which stands for "reflective 
amplification." While two of the basic rules of hacking are: Don't tell 
your target in advance and don't give away your methods, Radware 
security vice president Carl Herberger says the announcement is a 
classic Anonymous tactic.

"They are not financially motivated," he says. "They're after behavioral 
changes -- things like trying to stop SOPA. In that case, you almost by 
definition have to file your grievance -- tell them you're angry with 
them. They also like to boast of how effective they are, and how the 
rest of the world is not worthy of their technical talents."

[...]


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