War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show
Source: NBC News
War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show
BY MARK SCHONE
A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britains enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News.
The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous.
According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters Communications (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a denial of service (DDOS) attack the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.
The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.
The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly.
Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/war-anonymous-british-spies-attacked-hackers-snowden-docs-show-n21361
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Doubt they are still running those operations, so what information may have been gathered is not the way the NSA runs today.
A Simple Game
(9,214 posts)They are in business to steal commercial information, embarrassing information on other countries, friend and foe, and gather personal information on the general public, I doubt anything has changed.
You didn't think they were ever in business to thwart terrorism did you?
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)they have changed their mode of operation procedure, do not use the same procedures they have used in the past.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)This OP discusses one of the more important battle fields. The plutocrat's hackers vs. the People's hackers. The plutocrats of course have all their wealth behind them plus the government's resources. The People's hackers have liberty and freedom behind them.
loudsue
(14,087 posts)for the rest of us against the very crooked power brokers.
Most definitely
They need to break away and form small groups, we need Anonymous now more the ever.
Good one!
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)It's not quite the sharply-defined "good guys v. baddies" as we would all hope -- Most hackers are more likely to be motivated by money, not politics....
And I'd personally hesitate before calling anonymous "good," or on the side of "the people"...Anonymous operates independently and does what it wants...Sometimes their acts happen to serve the public interest, and sometimes they don't...
warrprayer
(4,734 posts)The movie has become a reality