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Pro-WikiLeaks attackers left themselves exposed

AM Timothy McDonald and staff
Cyber attackers crashed various sites to protest against them cutting financial ties with WikiLeaks


A cyber security expert says Australians who took part in cyber attacks that brought down the Visa, Mastercard and Paypal websites last week might not be aware that they could have broken the law.

Hundreds of members of an online community known as Anonymous deliberately crashed the sites to protest against the companies' decisions to cut off financial ties with the whistleblower site WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks has already released 1,344 of more than 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables, which has left governments around the world scrambling to deal with the fallout.

Professor Michael Fry, from the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney, says most of the people who took part in the attacks can be easily traced.

"In most jurisdictions here, they would have broken laws about abuse of computer facilities," he said.

"But in this case, authorities would have to show that someone was knowingly involved and because of the nature of the tool and the way it's been used, I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to establish fairly strong evidence that they were knowingly involved."

There have been reprisals against the pro-WikiLeaks attackers, with one pro-US attacker, using the title Operation: Fightback, able to seriously disrupt the cyber attackers' operations.

Experts say both sides used relatively unsophisticated methods, but if the feud escalates both sides will adopt more damaging methods.

Many people who were involved in the initial pro-WikiLeaks cyber attacks may have thought they were operating under a veil of secrecy.

Professor Fry says in many cases the cyber attackers actually did very little to hide their identities.

"I suspect these people don't really know what they are getting into and what the consequences might be. Being able to cover your tracks is fairly elementary," he said.

Anonymous has been using software called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which inundates servers with huge numbers of requests, effectively shutting down websites.

There has already been one arrest of a 16-year-old boy in the Netherlands for the pro-WikiLeaks cyber attacks.

Professor Fry says so far, the attacks have been relatively unsophisticated, but that could change as counterattacks force hackers to adopt more sophisticated measures.

"They used very simple techniques and they are likely to be caught out," he said.

"Now most people tend to learn from their mistakes and I think we are seeing the first signs of an increasing use of these sorts of tools for political cyber warfare.

"They are becoming commodities. This is a particularly simple tool but there are other denial-of-service tools that can be hired, mainly focused on criminal activity."

Guerilla warfare

To date it has been rare for cyber attackers to target each other as opposed to corporations or government websites.

Mark Pesce, an honorary associate in Digital Cultures at Sydney University, says these attacks are different.

"All the other encounters [have] been asymmetric, sort of like a guerrilla warfare versus a standard army while these are two more or less guerrilla armies going at it and no-one is quite clear what is going on," he said.

"It is all going to be very confusing. Anonymous is going to learn a lot by this. They say that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy - well, they've met the enemy."

Mr Pesce says it is difficult to predict how the battle between pro and anti-WikiLeaks attackers will play out, but he says it is likely both sides will become more sophisticated.

"Again, this is where we get into trouble in facing a group like Anonymous," he said.

"The question is whether some of the people who are calling themselves Anonymous have developed sophisticated attacking techniques.

"It is not clear if in fact people are being drawn to Anonymous because they see it as a beacon of hope.

"They will bring their own bags of tricks along. Some of those people will have fairly sophisticated bags of tricks but it is very hard to say whether that is going to then spread all across Anonymous or whether one person acting as Anonymous uses that bag of tricks."


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