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McAfee Labs :

Don’t Confuse ‘Anonymous’

With a Russian Gang

Thursday, December 30, 2010 at 1:11pm by Francois Paget
Francois Paget

The recent WikiLeaks disclosure of more than 250,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables got people worked up. Running opposite much public opinion, the main WikiLeaks defender in the hacktivism field is the “Anonymous” group.

After earlier engaging in various cyberdemonstrations against copyright-protection societies, Anonymous is now fully involved in a battle against WikiLeaks’ censors and detractors. At first we saw distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Later, Anonymous went after Bank of America.

Let’s take a look at the chronology of actions supporting one of the two camps:

  • November 28, 2010: The “Cablegate” war starts. A “hacktivist for good”–using the tool XerXes–claims responsibility for the WikiLeaks’ site downtime.

  • November 29: The “warlogs” and “cablegate” subdomains leave the French Octopuce hosting company, which does not have sufficient infrastructure to support the DDoS attacks. The domains transfer to Amazon.
  • December 1: Due to political and commercial pressures, Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks
  • December 2: New hosting service in France (OVH). EveryDNS.net terminates Wikileaks DNS services.
  • December 3: WikiLeaks sympathizers mobilize to replicate its data
  • December 4: WikiLeaks Paypal account is frozen. In the following days other institutions (PostFinance, MasterCard, Visa International) impose similar financial sanctions. The Anonymous group launches DDoS attacks against all of these “anti-WikiLeaks” companies. Sympathizers are invited to download LOIC (from Praetox Technologies). With the “hivemind” function, the application converts each tooled up computer in a volunteer bot allowing coordinated attacks.

  • December 9: A Dutch teenager known as Jeroenz0r is arrested on suspicion of triggering and administering the botnet involved in the MasterCard, Visa, and Paypal DDoS attacks
  • December 10: The Anonymous group announces it has stopped DDoS attacks (but the attacks will go on). They launch Operation Leakspin–a pun on the “Leekspin” animated joke. The objective is to pick out some of the best, least-publicized WikiLeaks information and post it in popular locations.

  • December 11: Another Dutch teenager is stopped for questioning. “Awinee” is apparently a volunteer, one of many who took part in the attacks.
  • December 13: An anonymous post on Pastebin.com says that computer graphics designer Alex Tapanaris has been arrested. His name was found in the metadata of a PDF press release written for the pro-WikiLeaks hacker group.

  • December 13: With Operation Leakflood, Anonymous encourages sympathizers to send faxes all day long to some of the company headquarters that decided to distance themselves from WikiLeaks
  • December 14: Wikileaks.org is online. Hosted in the United States and using DNS services from Dynadot, the empty website transparently redirects visitors to a site hosted in Russia (mirror.wikileaks.info). Spamhaus warns specifically about this site, which is hosted in a very dangerous “neighborhood” IP address space under the control of Russian cybercriminals. In payback, Spamhaus is DDoSed for this accusation, even though the URL is not on the list of real WikiLeaks mirrors at wikileaks.ch.
  • December 18: Anonymous suggests Operation Black Face (Facebook users are invited to use a black profile picture instead their usual one) and Operation Paper Storm (leafleting)

  • December 27: Bank of America becomes a target. The triggering IRC server is in Russia.

  • December 29: With Operation Bling (tags on notes), real activists continue their activities

As we examine this chronology, it seems to me that something is out of place:

  • The Anonymous group claims to have stopped DDoS attacks
  • The security community sends an alert about a suspicious WikiLeaks mirror site hosted on the dangerous Heihachi.net (a den of criminals)
  • Spamhaus suffers DDoS attacks but says neither LOIC nor LOIC-like tools are involved in the attacks
  • In some semiprivate forums AnonOps members deny responsibility
  • A new Anonymous communication network is created in Russia. Ten or so IRC servers are linked to the same Heidachi.net.
  • One of these IRC servers–irc.anonops.ru–drove #operationBoa (Bank of America, in second image above)

 
At this point, we need to ask whether Anonymous is behind all these actions or a criminal gang has gotten involved.

Whenever a big event occurs around the world (earthquake, celebrity death, popular feast day, etc.) cybercrime jumps at the chance to exploit it. And this appears to be the case with WikiLeaks and Anonymous. What an opportunity for criminals to take advantage of a volunteer army eager to take part in a struggle!

I am opposed to illegal activity on or off the Internet. I want to alert all hacktivists to be careful of engaging in any virtual demonstration when they cannot verify the launching source. Not only could their actions in fact be detrimental to their causes, they could also expose people to identity theft, financial fraud, and other troubles.

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Comments (6)

  • Anonymous January 27, 2011 7:56AM

    Anonymous is everyone and no one, so there’s no reason a “criminal gang” can’t also be Anonymous. The fact is that the majority of Anons willing to speak to any press or other outsiders are not the ones who do illegal activities, and may even disapprove of them. Trying to say that one group of Anons is “real” and the other is somehow illegitimate is a nonsensical assertion.

    By all means, discourage people from engaging in the illegal actions, but trying to assassinate the character of Anonymous is an act of futility. We’re not the good guys, we just happen to be doing good.

    Reply
  • CAT January 12, 2011 7:08AM

    Often it’s a “Lituanian Gang” or cybercriminals from other Baltic states, like those behind infamous “000webhostcom”, a massive botnet hiding behind the mask of free webhosting. Their activities range from “simple” spam to phishing and script-related hacking like that openly boasted about by a guy calling himself “AdSenseBoy”. His real name seems to be Mindaugas Lipskas, his acomplice or boss goes by the name of Aurimas Rapalis. So at least for them, without hiding their tracks well enough in earlier days they’re far from “Anonymous”, but US and EU (Baltic) authorities are either ignoring them or even (in Baltic states this is very likely) paid not to act…

    Reply
  • toyotabedzrock January 2, 2011 10:11PM

    The first sentence is incorrect as of 1-3-2011 only 1947 of 251,287 cables have been released.

    They are being redacted by news organizations around the world to protect innocent people.

    In general the cables are released as news organizations like the Guardian publish stories about them.

    Reply
  • Anonymous December 30, 2010 3:36PM

    This article is a nice summary, however not entirely correct. The anti-Wikileaks, Anti-Anonymous hacker you call XerXes goes by the name of th3j35t3r. (read this as the Jester). He claims to be using a platform called XerXes for these attacks so i can see why you got confused. This platform most likely does not excist allthough he claims to have developed it himself. Fact is he’s using Dos-attack.

    Anonymous did not attack Spamhaus, or approved of this attack. I think it’s plausible that Russian hackers are behind this attack since Spamhaus’ warning scared of potential victims. The fact that the URL is not on the list of real WikiLeaks mirrors at wikileaks.ch. proves to me that Anonymous had no motive for such an attack.

    On a final note: if the idealist Anonymous activists are being prosecuted, then so should tj35t3r. Everybody has his own believes, morals, values and therefor his own opinion. It shouldn’t matter on which side you are but same laws should apply indiscrimenately.

    Reply
    • Francois January 20, 2011 1:40PM

      Hi,

      In general, I agree with your comments. Yes, XerXes is the tool and Jester is the attacker (as it is visible in the screenshots). I quickly amended this mistake after the blog was posted. Regarding the Spamhaus DDoS attack, I wrote near the end of this blog that the organization explained it was not carried out with LOIC nor LOIC-like tools, but with a conventional botnet. This fact confirms your opinion. And finally, yes, in our democracies, all people have to obey the law.

      Thanks for your comments,
      Francois

      Reply
  • rubi December 30, 2010 2:25PM

    Native English speakers on a Russian host of questionable integrity are not indicative of a “Russian Gang” – simply a safer haven. Additionally, the Wikileaks issue is international so it should not cause any alarm bells to have any faction show up in any specific country. Not saying that Anonymous hasn’t been owned, however :) , just not necessarily by the particular genre this post refers to. Nice post, in any case, an enjoyable read.

    Reply