Feds raid server farms in bid to root out PayPal DDoS perps
On the trail of Anonymous
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Federal investigators have seized servers allegedly abused to launch a denial of service attack against PayPal earlier this month.
An affidavit obtained by the Smoking Gun contains testimony by federal agents convinced that systems at Texan hosting firm Tailor Made Services are likely to contain clues in the hunt for hacktivists who launched an attack against PayPal in response to its decision to freeze an account used by WikiLeaks. The suspension of the account followed the release of US diplomatic cables by the whistle blowing site.
Volunteers were encouraged by members of the loosely bound Anonymous collective to download a tool to pepper the websites of financial firms who had turned their back on WikiLeaks - including MasterCard, Visa and Swiss bank PostFinance as well as PayPal - with junk traffic.
FBI investigators are proceeding on the assumption that some used botnets of compromised machines in order to launch a more potent distributed denial of service attack against PayPal, knocking its corporate blog offline for at least several hours.
PayPal supplied FBI agents with eight IP addresses of systems used to run IRC chat servers associated with planning the so-called Operation Avenge Assange attacks. Investigators reckon the same systems were also used as command and control hubs for botnets used the DDoS assault against PayPal et al.
The Texan systems were traced back via a compromised machine at Host Europe, Germany. Investors alleged that the command to launch an attack against PayApl was made via systems hosted by Tailor Made Services in Texas and relayed via the servers at Host Europe in a bid to disguise its origin. A pair of log entries on the compromised Host Europe machine contained the same message: "Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs." according to a sworn statement from FBI agent Allyn Lynd.
The affidavit was used to obtained a search warrant used on a raid on Tailor Made Services on 16 December. Agents copied two hard drives from the targeted server during this raid. A second IP address associated with the pro-WikiLeaks attacks was traced to a virtual server physically hosted by Hurricane Electric in California.
It's unclear whether or not a suspect has been identified through the FBI's investigation thus far. ®
COMMENTS
Nail 'em up I say, nail some sense into 'em.
And I don't mean these stupid kids, I mean people like you that call for the death penalty for such minor crimes.
Whilst there are laws against ...
... electronic DDoS attacks, there are no laws against analogue ones. Thus it is perfectly legal for you to write a letter to your bank, and far more expensive for them to deal with it. There are no spam filters on a letterbox. It only takes a few 1000 at most messages to bring the system down, and the system is down for longer.
Happy New Year!!!
"And this was as wrong as pretty much everything else you've ever written. The people who won't take action for themselves are you."
Actually, it's just that some of us have more sense. I've done my fair share of things I shouldn't, and I continue to act against things I disagree with. What I don't do is stamp my feet like a belligerent kid using a tool someone else wrote whilst claiming to be a 'hacker'.
It wouldn't surprise me to know that 99% of Anonymous are 15 year old kids who consider themselves 'l337'.
DDoS isn't the way, and you engender no support from the general public through your actions. It's nothing more than a waste of time and of bandwidth. Are you hoping that the likes of PayPal etc are suddenly going to say "we'd better support Wikileaks lest we get DDoS'd again!". If so, you're clearly suffering from serious delusion and should seek immediate psychiatric help!
There are legal ways to take action, and yes, some may seem ineffectual. But fucking up everyone elses use of the Internet isn't the way to go. There was a recent statement saying that Anonymous had decided not to re-attack Amazon as it would impact on consumers (and not as the evidence suggests because you didn't have the resources!) yet you'll try to interrupt payment processing services? Pull your head out of your ass, all these actions do is portray you as snotty nosed brats worshipping an alleged rapist, and supporting the dumping of documents for which no public interest argument exists.
Anonymous may have done some sterling work against Scientology (and even then DDoS is not justified), but in this they've revealed themselves for the script kiddies that many of them clearly are.
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