This change in tactics shows increasing sophistication and could actually hit much harder than symbolic shutting down of websites. LOIC is “Low Orbit Ion Cannon,” which is open source software used in DDOS attacks.
This new mission, apparently, is to actually read the cables Wikileaks has published and find the most interesting bits that haven’t been publicized yet, then publicize them.
In my opinion, this action would have far more positive impact. Anonymous often repeats the Orwell quote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Looks like they decided to take those words to heart.
The Anonymous hacktivist group behind Operation Payback had its main Twitter account and Facebook pages taken away on Wednesday and has since the been decentralized in it’s social media efforts. This however didn’t stop one of the splinter accounts from tweeting out the below release, stating that the group essentially did not want to injure the companies targeted, but in fact wanted to “raise awareness.”
That was obvious to me from the start. If they had wanted to take down the sites permanently, they would have unleashed a one-way command to one of the many viral bot-nets to attack indefinitely. What they did was use a small number (under 1000) of machines to flood the sites for a short time. It was clearly an attention getting device… and it worked. 🙂