Sunday, July 24, 2011

Anonymous: Heroes or Villains?

There has been a lot of talk lately about this group that calls themselves “Anonymous” has been cracking the security of corporate and government entities and releasing the information they find as proof of abilities to hack these networks.

The IT community is watching this with absolute silence. They don’t want to say anything that would put their networks in the crosshairs of these network hooligans.

Their justification for not stepping up:

The bottom line for the IT security community is that it needs to protect systems and data, regardless of the motivation of the assailant.”

Everyone, in my opinion, is missing the point. If these hooligans were really doing a ‘service’ to the IT community they would tell us what networks they could not penetrate.

They would also recognize the fact that obtaining a low-level PDF file from NATO (that wasn’t classified in the first place) and publishing it as proof that the network security is poor only extends the public’s misunderstanding of what they are doing.  Folks…. the document was not located in a security network. The security classification of the document meant it shouldn’t be published in a newspaper, but they really didn’t care who had access (it was a budget).

The denial of service attack against the CIA’s website should have been classified as a “prank” because that is what it was.

All other major network hacks have turned out to be inside-jobs. Individuals who the corporation trusted turned over the keys to the networks to these knuckleheads.

I’m going to post a plan this week which if everyone follows on their personal computer to insure their own security. So keep checking back.

Anonymous, LulzSec: Heroes or Villains?

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