But the most significant aspect of the Operation Payback attack was the means by which its directors managed to corral the thousands of computers necessary to make it work. On its Twitter feed, Operation Payback directed followers to download a program that would effectively let the hackers take control of a part of the followers’ computers, and use them to launch attacks. Suddenly, the offensive became an exercise in social media, leveraging a base of like-minded computer users to wage digital war against multinational corporations. Anyone who liked the idea of going to battle on the Web for a cause they believed in could enlist with just a couple of clicks. And perhaps most frighteningly for the targets of the attacks, thousands of people were motivated enough to sign up.
“For most of us, the Internet is just a means to an end,” says Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art and Design “But for a certain community of people, the Internet is an end in of itself. On an issue like [WikiLeaks], they’re not identifying with the U.S. or the U.K. or Sweden – they’re citizens of the Internet.”
In a short statement about the pro-WikiLeaks attacks, website spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”
Hacking, like several other areas of computing, can be very loosely classified as white hat or black hat – the former is a term that describes hackers who work on fixing weak code or otherwise working toward some greater good; the latter describes those who break into systems with malicious intent. The rise of groups such as Anonymous, and their DDoS attacks against companies they deem unethical, has split the hacker community, and created a third, “grey hat,” category.
“Some of the counterattacks [against perceived anti-WikiLeaks entities such as Amazon], some of that youthful righteous indignation I can understand,” says Jack Daniel, a veteran information security expert and regular fixture at DefCon, North America’s largest hackers’ convention. “But if the battle is about free speech, we have to accept that free speech is sometimes stuff we don’t agree with.
“Either buy more from Amazon or start buying less, but don’t try to shut them down. That just solidifies the anti-hacker mentality.”
PUNK ROCK ROOTS
Julian Assange had a deep voice for a teenager, which was helpful, because he was about to pose as a government employee in order to steal a password.
It was 1987, more than two decades before facilitating the biggest classified information leak in history, and the then-16-year-old was sitting in his bedroom in Emerald, a tiny town just outside Melbourne, Australia. He was trying to break into a mainframe computer in Sydney. To do so, he would have to call a client who had an account on the mainframe and convince him he was a government employee in need of the client’s password. To simulate a busy government office, Mr. Assange tape-recorded himself reading Shakespeare at a volume just low enough to simulate background chatter, with his dot-matrix printer running and the click-clack sound of his fingers randomly hitting keyboard keys. When he called the client, he played the tape over the phone. The gamble worked – the client fell for it and handed over his password. Shortly afterward, Mr. Assange was logged into the mainframe in Sydney, scrolling through confidential e-mails. He had proven his worth to Australia’s underground digital community. He was a hacker.
