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Is the US government covering up the extent new of
new hacking activity.
Welcome to The Red Couch, a web show about Internet freedom
and security.
Last month, US court systems websites were crippled by a cyberattack.
Vital information on sensitive cases was unavailable to the public.
A spokesman for the courts said this was a classic
denial of the service attack where hackers release
a landslide of requests to a server hosting the website
causing the site to shut down.
But the FBI status was not an act of terrorism, instead
the court websites were suffering technical problems.
Nevertheless, a group called the European Cyber Army
claimed responsibility.
The Red Couch got in touch with the European Cyber Army and Nato Dust.
Why they carried out the attack and who's next on the hit list
Because a lot of hackers are from Eastern Europe I am deciding to adopt
and East European accent when giving the answers of the European Cyber Army.
They told us: we attack the US Courts
because of its failure to execute
impartial Justice! One of the examples
of impartial justice: we have thousand of cases like that, such as Jeremy
Hammond, Barrett Brown, and their to sentence Sabu.
Hammond and Brown are hackers in prison while Sabu is a hacker turned
FBI informant, the ultimate *** in geek world.
We asked them, what do you think about the FBI's response
"this is due to technical problems" and they replied:
As the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
label the attack as technical glitches you can expect that the theater lover look
a technical glitches you hope to send a message to the justices system.
How can you verify that you were responsible
for the cyberattacks without revealing your identity.
And they replied: we don't need to verify
anything, the Feds and reporters must verify it.
But the US courts, UK Courts and Peacer
can expected more down time coming up.
Now, I can't be sure European Cyber Army
is the real deal, but
it takes a lot of nerve to take responsibility for a federal crime
for a laugh. We've tried to get in touch with the FBI to get their response
but unlike hackers admitting to cyber terrorism,
they didn't get back to us.They may not be reaching the headlines
but hacks have been increasing the last 18 months, worldwide.
Two weeks ago US online security company CloudFlare
said fought back against a massive hack against one of its customers
using the clocks on their computers. This was an attack
on network time protocol, NTP.
How does this work? Listen to our lecturer.
Okay, what you have here are some
good computers, how do we know they're good?
They're smiling and they have a little halo. And here you have
a good server.
These computers can be part of a network,
saying the company, and their time has to be synchronized
in order to do that they have to ask a a server
what the time is and the server tells them and they
all have the same time.
Now, here, you have a bad computer.
How do we know it's bad?
it has a little Hitler moustache and he's squinting his teeth.
And the bad computer has lots of
all friends, called
bots and these live in thousands and thousands of computers
sleeping and waiting to be activated.
When the bad computer wants to hack
into the server it wakes up all of these bots
and tells them to pretend to be
these good computers asking the time
of the server and the server sends back
information to the good computers but when this happens
thousands and thousands of times it crashes
these computers and any websites they may be hosting.
CEO of CloudFlare, Mackey Prince told us these attacks do not require much
technical sophistication but can cause enormous damage.
He said there was nothing about the target that made them believe that a
government or more sophisticated entity was involved.
Yes, individuals arming themselves
with massive Canons using simple tech
which causes mayhem.
A hacking insider told us that anyone can declare an internet protest using these kind of weapons.
Individuals now can have more power than corporations
and governments. Yes, the democratization of hacking
has begun. Anyone can be a hacker now:
you, your mom or your dad.
How do we fight back? The day we fight back was an attempt
by big Internet companies such as Facebook
and hacking groups such an Anonymous to combine their efforts
to lobby the US government to stop its
sweep of your personal data.
But it was not such a success. In our last issue of the Red Couch
we asked you to send us your suggestions as to how
we can better fight back against the surveillance state.
Thank you for your applies and we now want to hear more from you.
So please keeps sending us those emails at
howfightback@yahoo.com
The Red Couch is brought to you by CyberGhost 5,
a virtual private network that gives you anonymity online and allows you to surf the
web, securely.