Anonymous vs GCSB | The Jackal

25 Aug 2013

Anonymous vs GCSB

Today, the Herald on Sunday reported:

Worldwide activist group Anonymous is believed to be behind a hack attack on the Government Communications Security Bureau website on Friday.

On Thursday, Anonymous posted a threatening video on YouTube, claiming that Prime Minister John Key, the Act Party and veteran politician Peter Dunne were to be held responsible for the destruction of internet freedom and basic human rights of New Zealand citizens by passing the GCSB bill, "which allows your government to spy on you".

It's taken the HoS until Sunday to write 178 words about it? They even fail to mention the name of the operation: #OpFuckGCSB.

It is understood the GCSB website suffered a saturation of external communication requests, to the point where it could not respond to legitimate traffic.

The communications interception agency confirmed the attack slowed its gateway for about 30 minutes.

There are conflicting stories here. Anonymous claimed that the "tango" was down, meaning the GCSB website had crashed. The GCSB claims that the site was slowed, which is a completely different thing. Why I wonder are they trying to downplay the hacking?

This follows similar denial of service (DDoS) attacks back in July whereby the haktivist group disabled 14 websites linked to the National Party. Interestingly this more recent article fails to mention that these attacks are occurring on a regular basis and that the government has no answers.

Clearly John Key was wrong to claim on Campbell Live that the GCSB was some sort of antivirus program. They cannot even protect their own websites from a low level DDoS attack.

In the warning video, a man wearing a black hooded outfit and Guy Fawkes mask said: "We, as Anonymous have decided to take action. To the Government of New Zealand, you now have our full attention and we will be watching your every move ... this is your final warning."

Actually, it's a computer generated voice, not an actual person saying anything. Most computers have text to speech software built into their operating systems these days. The man in the video is stock footage and used in lots of Anonymous projects. Whoever that is in the video isn't likely to have anything to do with this recent attack on the GCSB's website.

Here's the video:



A spokesman for GCSB said there could have been some temporary degradation of service.

Why they would try to downplay an effective DDoS attack against the GCSB website because of National's expansion of spying powers might have something to do with the FBI recently claiming that they had dismantled Anonymous.

This claim is of course untrue as well, being that Anonymous cannot be dismantled. Claiming such a thing clearly indicates that the FBI has no idea about how Anonymous operates.