Moving away from the light-hearted approach to Wikileaks, and its glamorous leader, Julian Assange, here's a small piece about the more serious side of things.
The basic subject is, as usual, power. In the case that follows, we're looking at the power used by the authorities to attempt to deal with the power wielded by the urban warriors on the internet.
The five people, between 15 - 26, arrested yesterday for mounting the revenge DDOS attacks that temporarily crippled Visa, PayPal and Mastercard, after they cut off financial services to Wikileaks, have now been released on bail.
A DOS (Denial of Service) attack works by flooding a server with more network traffic than it is capable of processing. This hinders or prevents the server’s normal operation and sometimes causes its complete failure. In a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, as in this case, multiple PCs coordinate the attack.
The arrests are the first in investigations in the UK by the Metropolitan Police's Central 'e' Crime Unit, and are "part of an ongoing investigation into Anonymous which began last year following criminal allegations of DDOS attacks by the group against several companies," Scotland Yard said. "This investigation is being carried out in conjunction with international law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US."
These attacks are illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act and carry a maximum fine of £5,000 or a max. of a 10 year sentence.
The FBI has issued more than 40 search warrants across the US in connection with its investigations into Anonymous.
The 5 arrested are assumed to have links with Anonymous, a leaderless internet-based group, sometimes referred to in the press as hacktivists, though it's not accurate to refer to them all as hackers. Anyone can join Anonymous by downloading software and following the group's instructions, so joining hundreds of other computers, which can be brought into play to mount DDOS attacks. Members are mostly young and male. Since the Wikileaks saga got going, the membership of Anonymous has increased.
It's ironic that the 5 arrested, though apparently having links with Anonymous, seemed unable to keep themselves anonymous, as the police found them through their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, which they hadn't hidden. There is technology out there that makes one's connection anonymous, so neither the authorities nor anyone can see who is behind the computer. Of course, maybe the 5 didn't want to hide themselves. Who knows? But as they were displaying their addresses for all to see, I'm surprised the police took so long to get to them.
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