A website used by Anonymous to co-ordinate cyber-attacks has itself come under assault, reportedly from disillusioned members of the notorious hacking collective.
According to the Financial Times, purported Anonymous veterans have revealed there's been a major split within the group.
A number of supposed Anonymous administrators have since used other sites like Twitter to suggest a rebellion is taking place within the group.
Security professionals working in a voluntary capacity reportedly forwarded internet chat logs and internet addresses of alleged Anonymous members to the FBI, which is currently investigating if the group was involved in the recent hacking of the PlayStation Network.
A message posted over the weekend on AnonOps.in and signed by five people calling themselves "the 'Old' AnonOps netstaff " read: "We are profoundly sorry for this drama, and we can't give you an estimate on when service will resume normally."
Sony has enlisted a crack team of cyber-security investigators in a bid to catch those responsible for data breaches that have compromised over 100 million registered PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment accounts.
Comments
50 comments so far...
TheCrimsonFenix on 11 May '11 said:
Good.
G_R7 on 11 May '11 said:
This only proves that Karma is, in fact, a bitch.
Demon_Darko on 11 May '11 said:
Karma's A Bitch XD
boskersrevenge on 11 May '11 said:
I suppose being "anonymous" isn't doing them any favours.
Can someone remind me why they're about? I mean I know it's a bunch of losers thinking they're sticking it to the man, but what do they think they're doing.
justforkicks101 on 11 May '11 said:
http://post.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2009/01/29/1233270615-haha_simpsons.jpg
gobs**tes
DAEDALUS79 on 11 May '11 said:
This is going to end up like Die Hard 4, mark my words there will be nerd casualties. Best shave my head and stock pile tank tops just in-case.
RichPerry on 11 May '11 said:
Who hacks the hackers, eh? Or as I've commonly heard it, herp derp-a-derp.
g_marrs on 11 May '11 said:
I'd say that it's a fairly safe assumption that those who revealed the names are most likely those responsible for the Sony attack and not revealed names themselves.
raredevice on 11 May '11 said:
What a superb story this is turning into. If this keeps up there'll be a movie about it. Mark my words!
El Mag on 11 May '11 said:
It's fast becoming like Eastenders. Next week a girl anonymous will say she's pregnant with boy anonymous's baby. Then they'll find out it's really his cousin anonymous's kid, then boy and cousin anonymous will fight in the pub while she shouts "LEAVE IT ANONYMOUS HE AIN'T WORTH IT"
Random Hangman on 11 May '11 said:
This is honestly what I believe makes up Anonymous (I keep wanting to call them Hey Nonny Mouse but can't think of a good slogan to back it up)...
99% internet geeks who jumped on the bandwagon after watching the Matrix too many times and think that it's "cool"
1% Genuine internet/cyber-security geniuses who don't have either the social skills or intelligence to utilise their talents and knowledge in a sensible environment.
I have to say that I'm quite pleased to see their ivory cyber tower starting to crumble so that the people who just want to use the web for their banking, online purchasing or gaming can do so without these jumped-up little pratts buggering it up.
That is all...
Sleepaphobic on 11 May '11 said:
Been saying that forever son. It really is a crazy story.
SavageEvil on 11 May '11 said:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand..." what on earth is happening there? Surprised this thread is filled up with Anon defense force like they do in other threads. How the mighty have fallen and man this is going to hurt a good bit for some of these guys. FBI is going to come a knocking, watch out for the Marshalls too.
TheCrimsonFenix on 11 May '11 said:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/33lcoev.jpg
yodalicious on 11 May '11 said:
Nice. A rebellion within the ranks. Seems to me a part of the group is not happy with the denials that they attacked Sony. Hope they hurt each other soo bad that Anonymous dis-bands (I know, wishful thinking). On a cautionary note though, if the core of Anonymous did not in fact steal the info from PSN and this rebel group did, you would want the details of the rebels posted on-line so that the authorities can hunt them down. You wouldn't want to see the rebels win in this case. They could wreak havoc not just on Sony but on Microsoft and others. Imagine it.. No PSN or Live for months on end because these asses keep up a denial of service attack or just keep cracking into the systems and taking info because they can......
Ok. Just took a breath. Surely the above nightmare scenario won't happen. Surely the PSN will be on when I get home from work, surely Man City will have been relegated instead of getting Champs League football next year, and surely I'll get some before the wedding. I'll happily take 2 outta the above 4 scenarios please.
raredevice on 11 May '11 said:
Mind who you call son fella-me-jim-lad, I'm fifteen years older than you!
nathar on 11 May '11 said:
The problem with this group is that the good that they do is far outweighed by the number of clueless idiots who think using LOIC constitutes an awesome hack. I'm all for activism aimed in the right way at the right people and a good well aimed hack can do that. Look at the damage that was done to ACS:Law that has put an end to their piracy breach letters.
Given that they deny the Sony hack, but files were found suggesting they were responsible, it sounds to me like the management have lost control of the foot soldiers.
wildhook2 on 11 May '11 said:
Then a baby dies
Baby swapping incoming.........
starvinbull on 11 May '11 said:
Did anonymous just eat itself? Guess when the FBI get a look at the list of names we'll soon find out how innocent they all are.
Bear in mind people that as many of them that are found to have prior knowledge of the attack or discussed it before it happened are very likely to be found guilty of conspiracy or being involved even if they didn't actually participate.
The other hacktivist activities they carried out will all have substantial rewads attached to them not to mention serious jail time.
The irony of it all is that if they are caught and try to dispose of evidence they could be charged with the most serious crimes seeing as how they are part of a group. If they want to shave years off their eventual punishment they'll need to admit to eveything and/or inform on those that are more guilty. I'm sure a few will get away with it all but the fear of being outed and caught must be terrible.
And all because because they wanted to play at being hard men over they internet.
I'm glad they could be caught and punished but I hope they don't find themselves in a Gay McKinnon situation, facing 50 years jail time over a hobby.
boskersrevenge on 11 May '11 said:
This I struggle with, what good do they do?
murph_77 on 11 May '11 said:
Well aint Karma a bitch!! Maybe it was the Anonymous members that play on PSN and they too are hacked off not being able to play online for 3 weeks. I bet when PSN is available there will be a massive network surge and what is the betting Europe will be the last to be switched on despite the 360's dominance in the States. I hope not though because I have an itchy R1 and R2 finger!!!!
Ali_ on 11 May '11 said:
Somewhere , in an FBI office, someone is furiously copying and pasting all those IPs. Bye, bye Anonymous, enjoy prison.
Random Hangman on 11 May '11 said:
1) They support the "Guy-Fawkes-out-of-V-for-Vendetta" facemask business
2) Err... nope, it's gone
Imaduck on 11 May '11 said:
Seems likely to me that this is somehow linked to the Sony thing. Maybe the FBI or someone paying off 1 side to open up the site or something?
g_marrs on 11 May '11 said:
I think he may be referring to wikileaks.
Multiplayerking on 11 May '11 said:
So there are hackers within the hackers. Like a dream within a dream. This is so complex and cool.
nagashino on 11 May '11 said:
im just an ordinary pc user but these little hacking t**ts have cost me money that i could ill afford to fix the results of their ilks efforts.
just once i'd like to come across one of them in real life.i work the doors at nightclubs for a living and it would give me great satisfaction to 'express' myself upon them.
if any of them use nightclubs in london,i'd advise them to keep looking over their shoulders and keep their mouths shut,or life could change for them.
Laughlyn on 11 May '11 said:
I smell a film deal brewing.
Peopel will always lash at at these hacker type groups, sure most are misguided matrix wannabes but then you have your genuine guys that will just attack for a purpose, liek with wikileaks. matercard ect essentially blocked a business from earning money by not processing donations to their website, in their way it was their own attack at wikileaks, anon just did the same back by causing their website to crash meaning customers couldnt process online banking. There is two sides to every battle, sure anons methods of causing the mastercard website to crash may be more aggressive, but mastercard did make their own move too.
Its kinda like summat i saw in a bar this weekend. A guy hits on a girl, she not so politely told him not interested so he then poured his pint over her, she then lashed out and punched him in face, he then pushed her to floor before security got there.
Who's really to blame for the incident? she could have let him down easier, he shouldnt have poured his drink over her but she was one that made first real physical attack. it doesnt always take an aggressive act for something to escalate way out of hand.
as for the sony attack it only takes one of these matrix wannabes to get a little narked off that the attack against sony ended by the core group, maybe they didnt think the deal between hotz and sony was acceptable to them and so plan their own attack on sony without the backing of the whole group. anon are still in the firing line as sony have a previous threat from when sony were after hotz its all a tit-for-tat game and like my example above
Sony remove other os, hotz reverse engineers ps3, sony hunt him down and blame him for teh flood of CFW's, hacker group attacks sony.
passive actions once again escalating to a more aggressive actions and sometimes its not always black and white, right and wrong.
verynaughtyboy on 11 May '11 said:
Interesting quote at the start there. That was how Jesus reasoned that he didn't expel the demons by means of the Devil's power. One of the exorcisms he performed was on that group of demons that called themselves Legion and said it was "because we are many." You'll recognise that this was a quote used by Anonymous early on - want some bread with that cheese?
martinawatson on 11 May '11 said:
Justin Bieber could play Geohot and then fast forward and have the "old geohot" played by danny De Vito............or not
Sleepaphobic on 11 May '11 said:
OK dad? I'm confused.
BenThomasFoster on 11 May '11 said:
It's a shame really if they we're behing the sony stealing then ok karma but they used to and still are a force of good in the online world. Biut like nelson mandela really a good terrorist
Gaseous Snake on 11 May '11 said:
That'll happen when you're sat on the fence for too long.
carlos928 on 11 May '11 said:
First a Facebook movie ...... now we are going to have a movie about this whole incident portraying Sony as Mother Teresa and the Anonymous group as terrorist group taken down by Jason Statham as double agent to take down the organization from the inside and super cool amazing shootouts resulting in the destruction of the Anonymous building revealing the twist end that it was all a ploy to take down hackers for good only needing a good reason to go after them with all their might. This is MY MOVIE anyone uses this and I well better damn get royalties! Im willing to play GRUNT #23!
Atko10 on 11 May '11 said:
Just shows what sort of people these hackers are. No loyalty even to themselves. F*ck the lot of 'em!
duende667 on 11 May '11 said:
without any semblance of order or command structure this was inevitably going to happen,they proved this in their response to sony by pretty much admitting that the left hand does'nt know what the right hand is doing.now they know how it feels...
The Bossman on 11 May '11 said:
Ah sweet delicious irony, how I've missed you.
Keeping track of their members is impossible I tells ya. Any man and their dog can join, and if there's some skilled hackers already joining them, they can take apart their organisations inside-out - PERFECT, do it some more pls.
kimoak on 11 May '11 said:
The guys from 'Hackers' were much cooler... I bet there is a Zero cool and Acid burn withing their ranks... And I bet they look a right state.
HACK THE PLANEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!!!!!!!!!
Barca Azul on 11 May '11 said:
Makes you think someone from AA was responsible for the Sony hack or something similar that didn't have agreement of all.
Its a bit like extremist groups where someone decides to go a bit too far.
g_marrs on 11 May '11 said:
Alcoholics Anonymous were behind this!?
KK-Headcharge78 on 12 May '11 said:
Have that c**ts, bitten by your own, what a shower of s**t.
DavidVM on 12 May '11 said:
Oh brilliant, now the anonymous website is down as well as PSN. So now not only can I not play Portal 2 co-op, I've also can't get access to the most pathetic, empty and pretentious threats on the internet. Hopefully I'll be compensated for this and get two free deluded threats out of a choice of five.
meh2allfanboys on 12 May '11 said:
"We are profoundly sorry for this drama, and we can't give you an estimate on when service will resume normally."
We dont want your service to resume at all never mind normally i hope you all get 15 years in the clink you anonymous noobs.
WHERESMYMONKEY on 12 May '11 said:
Please CVG stop reporting on Anon. You do it with all the understanding that the wright stuff does about gaming. The entire point of Anonymous is that they are decentralised and well anonymous. Anyone can join, thats kind of the point.
However the whole anonymous deally comes from the chan sites. 4chan being the main one. This has nothing to do with them. If you look at the stuff anon have actually done. It's usually with good intentioned and they wouldn't attack PSN. Hell they tried to get Gabe Newell made the face of Covergirl in the US, Filled Youtube with porn, Had the main admin of 4chan voted times most influential man and managed to get a law firm that carried out some incredibly shady practices in regards to blackmailing people over ip infringment sued back into the stoneage.
These are good things, Funny things, Do a little digging on these guys. Spend some time on the chan sites and you'll realise that they'res a lot more to it than has been made out over the last few days.
Freedom of information, net neutrality and insisting business be carried out with a level of responsibility aren't exactly the crys of a boogeyman.
_Marty_ on 12 May '11 said:
Didn't Anon deny the Sony attacks? Whats the point of them hacking a site then denying it - defeats their purpose, no?
And if they didn't hack Sony, why all the hate?
dazzauk06 on 12 May '11 said:
hahahahahahahahahahaha
The irony in this is awesome! Seriously though, i think Anonymous are looking like they may come out of this worse than Sony themselves! Once PSN is back up and people get their free games (as long as they're good and not damn mega drive classics or the like) i think people may quickly forget about Sony's part in all this. People seem to be after blood when it comes to Anonymous right now. Their "our members are anonymous so we cannot be sure if we did it or not" attitude pretty much just incriminates them further and their pompous "we are legion" spoutings means gamers now really hold a hatred for them (or at least that's the impression i get). Sorry but i just don't buy the whole "We're standing up for consumer rights/freedom of speech" thing. If they had anything to do with this whole downtime at all then they cannot use this argument. I myself am not overly bothered about the PSN downtime, being mainly an offline gamer although i will admit i do miss the use of the PS Store (being a plus member). I just hate it when the actions of the few have an adverse effect on the lives of the many.
sonic_uk on 12 May '11 said:
I couldn't help but raise a smile while reading this. What goes around comes around, now these d***heads are getting a taste of their own medicine.
flash501 on 12 May '11 said:
True. They did say there was a good chance it could've been a number of their members acting on their own though.
I'd imagine there's a good chance the same people are responsible for this hack as well.
FoxySnake on 12 May '11 said:
This is some of the sweetest news I've heard in ages. I respect the good things anonymous have done (yes they've done some decent acts) attacking a company for tryinto prevent piracy is wrong. Yeah "Sony has our IP" who cares if you're innocent.
I hope the FBI does damage to the few idiots who were possibly involved in the Sony case.
Woo-hoo!
Marlonjb on 12 May '11 said:
Good. Now round up this sad bunch of losers and give them jail time.