All Not-So-Quiet On The WikiLeaks Front

With the release on bail of Julian Assange, it appears that a Christmas ceasefire has descended on the WikiLeaks scene. But the war will break out again in the New Year.

It will certainly drum up a storm if the rumour is true that Sweden has done a quiet deal with the US to hand Assange over to face espionage charges after he is extradited from the UK, as his lawyer has claimed. The UK legal authorities will, or should, be angry because it would be a misuse of the extradition law.

DDoS Cannon Is Being Refitted

In turn, this would stir up the hive of the Anonymous Operation. It has been predicted that the group will attack UK government sites if Assange is extradited ; a UK government security advisor has warned these attacks could be serious and the police have been watching Anonymous for some time.

Although the group has threatened to attack  which still seems to be mainly offline and seeking a new host. There does seem to be some background activity on the DDoS front with Anonymous trying to get open source developer to sew up some of the holes in the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software.

Several developers have filed their versions of LOIC with Geeknet’s Sourceforge.net Web site and there is a cry for cloaking because LOIC, originally designed as a test tool for DDoS defence effectiveness, not a hacking tool, does not hide the IP address of the source of the attack.

This last revelation begs the question as to why there have not been many arrests among the hacktivists. According to Sourceforge, 88,000 copies of LOIC have been downloaded and it is believed that around 9,000 computers took part in the recent attacks. Surely, not all of these machines were truly anonymous?

The Guardian newspaper has claimed that th  group is not the loosely linked “Internet gathering” it claims to be but a distinct hierarchy emanating from a core of a dozen or so hackers. These work from “command and control” sites which can only be accessed by those who have been personally invited.

One pro-WikiLeaks hacker has stepped forward to be interviewed by Sky TV yesterday. The interviewee said that he was a member of Anonymous and chose to be called Bass. He wore a mask to hide his true identity and tried to put across the aims of the group.

“Our pool of targets is actually very limited,” he said. “We are going after the agencies that were directly involved in the censorship of WikiLeaks. They include PayPal who cut off services and withheld funds. The same with Visa and MasterCard, then Amazon who cut off their service support.”

He went on to say that the media was a forbidden target along with social media sites. Adding that every site suggested as a target is closely examined and the pros and cons of an attack are duly considered before any final decision is made.

Following the arrest of two Dutch hackers, a third arrest has been made. This time its in Greece where Web designer Alex Tapenaris is under investigation after he was linked to Anonymous when his name appeared on a press release PDF posted by the group last week.

It seems abundantly clear that, while Julian assange may be lying low and keeping quiet over Christmas, preparing for the next round of the legal battle, people on all sides of this issue will be very busy indeed.