September 9th, 2009
'Anonymous' group attempts DDoS attack against Australian government
Following a threat posted on YouTube a month ago, the the well known malicious pattern of the “Anonymous group” failed to materialize earlier today when the group attempted to launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the web sites of Australia’s Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s web site as a protest against Internet censorship.
What tactics did they use, why it failed and who’s behind it? Let’s review the 09-09-2009.org campaign, as well as Operation Didgeridie.
From a technical perspective, the attack was a low-level crowdsourcing DDoS attack that only managed to shut down the Primer Minister’s web site for only a few minutes through multiple web requests run under several different threads, a standard feature for average denial of service tools.
Despite the campaigner’s propaganda site descriptive enough to point out 09-09-2009.org as the day for the attack, the use of link baiting for the purpose of increasing the load on a web server, usually has a short-lived effect, which is exactly what appears to have taken place earlier today.
Who’s behind the attack, or may have something to do with the organizational efforts? Just like a previous case related to the “anonymous” group’s DDoS activities on behalf of their members, where a 19 years old teen pleaded guilty for organizing the attack against the Church of Scientology, in this very latest attack,there appears to be a teen involved in the 09-09-2009.org site.
The 09-09-2009.org Campaign
Data speaks for itself. A cached copy of the propaganda site from August, includes a link — now removed — to a MySpace profile (myspace.com/andthesearethetemptation) which is now redirecting to the profile of a 17 years old teen from Australia (myspace.com/lynagh), that has also posted a blog entry featuring “Anonymous”group’s propaganda video.
A brief retrospective of the teen’s attempt to monetize his MySpace popularity by offering to send MySpace bulletins — spamming in this case — to his users, indicates that he’s been trying to do so since 2007, when he was offering to send 5 bulletins for $3 to 927 Friends! under the same account, followed by another ad using the handle “AusieHerp” offering to send 150 friend requests for a dollar.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to establish a connection here, especially when the low-level crowdsourcing DDoS attack is theoretically in the arsenal of every 17 years old MySpace rock star with 5773 (automatically added) friends on his profile, who’s been monetizing their number since he was 15. Where the teen is clearly involved, the real coordination is happening from a publicly accessible Wiki under Operation Didgeridie.
Next –>
Pages: 1 2
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Zero Day via Email alerts or RSS.
