Cyber Crime & the Future of the Internet

With the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) treating successful cyber attacks by "Operation Payback" as criminal offenses, a new level of ambiguity is being introduced into the enforcement of cyber crime laws.

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[A]ccording to a recent chat held by the Chaos Communications Congress, an annual conference of hackers now in its 27th year [...] with a tracker-less torrent and a single "malicious node," "anyone with a moderate bandwidth connection can induce DDoS attacks with the BitTorrent cloud."

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The exploit would appear to be a new innovation in the formation of what are known as "botnets," or computers with malicious software that are at least partially under the control of a remote operator, in many cases a cyber criminal who uses the distributed computer power for nefarious purposes.

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Utilization of such technology to attack the web operations of companies like MasterCard Worldwide or PayPal -- both of which, among others, were brought down earlier this month by "Operation Payback" for their refusal to do business with secrets outlet WikiLeaks -- would likely be classified a serious crime.

The FBI has already raided a Dallas-based hosting company and copied the contents of two hard drives in connections with attacks on PayPal, and a 16-year-old Dutch teen was arrested for allegedly running a chat room connected to "Anonymous." It is reasonable to expect more raids soon.

  Raw Story

But here’s the part of the article that intrigued me:

Researchers found that between August 2009 and September 2010, a collection of just 280 sites run by human rights organizations were hit with 140 different distributed DDoS attacks. There were likely many others that went unnoticed

So who is it doing the attacking? That seems like an inordinate amount of attacks on human rights websites.

Given the tactics of "Anonymous," answering each official escalation against WikiLeaks with increasingly larger attacks, it may be only a matter of time before torrents are used to attack a major bank or even the US government.

And that, you may rest assured, is what the government is going to use as an excuse to gag the internet.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

2:00 pm UPDATE – JUST IN:

The Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu-PF) website, Zimbabwean government website and Zimbabwean Finance Ministry website were the target of cyber attacks on Thursday by a loose-knit group of online hacktivists known as "Anonymous."

The websites were hit with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks after Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's wife, Grace Mugabe, sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks cable that alleged she was connected with illicit diamond trade.

All three websites targeted by "Anonymous" were knocked offline and the Finance Ministry website was also defaced with messages saying "We are Anonymous" and "The world hates us, we kill our own people, we have no control of the economy, we repress free speech, we kill and rape for fun, we are Zanu-PF."

  Raw Story