What gives an aganim to a shadow demon. What to collect on Shadow Demon
Over the past week, for the first time, many of us have heard about the Lizard Squad hackers, who have already claimed responsibility for two high-profile DDoS attacks: on the Malaysia Airlines website, which began redirecting users to a page that says “404 - Aircraft Not Found”, and on Facebook, which was unavailable for a full 40 minutes.
Facebook, however, denied the rumors of a hacking attack; instead, a developer error was cited as the cause of the site's malfunction. Malaysia Airlines has also managed to assure users that the site was not hacked, just temporarily transferred to another domain name.
And yet, who are the Lizard Squad? The next "hacktivists" trying to convey their political agenda, or a group of teenagers having fun? Do they pose a real threat or are they only strong in name? And what is their place among other hacker groups? Below we will talk about the hackers who have made themselves known the most in recent times.
The Lizard Squad gained notoriety after attacks on major IT companies, including Sony, Microsoft and Facebook. The general public first heard about them in August 2014 when they hacked several online games, including League of Legends and Destiny. They were followed by more significant attacks on Sony's Playstation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live.
One gets the impression that the hackers have a personal score with Sony. In August 2014, they reported a bomb on board the airliner, which was supposed to fly one of the presidents of the company. As a result, the plane made an emergency landing.
In addition, the group hints at its involvement in the Islamic State. During the attack on Malaysia Airlines, they called themselves the "Cyber Caliphate" (also called the hacking arm of the Islamic State). Moreover, in August they planted an ISIS flag on Sony's servers.
At first glance, Lizard Squad are driven by purely political motives, however, it is very likely that it is much more important for them to demonstrate the capabilities of their Lizard Stresser service. As such, claims of links to the Islamic State may be nothing more than an attempt to get more media attention.
After the attacks on PSN and Xbox Live, US and UK authorities launched an investigation that ended with the arrest of a 22-year-old resident of Twickenham and a teenager from Southport (Britain).
Probably the most famous hacker organization, Anonymous is a decentralized association of tens of thousands of "hacktivists" who work together to hack websites in protest.
The group gained notoriety after attacks on a number of major political, religious and corporate resources. Their accomplishments include hacking the Pentagon website, threatening Facebook and Los Zetas, the Mexican drug cartel, and declaring war on the Church of Scientology.
In 2010, Anonymous launched the Payback operation after Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and other companies refused to serve WikiLeaks. They also openly supported the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 by attacking the New York Stock Exchange website.
Since 2009, numerous people have been arrested in America, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey for alleged involvement with Anonymous. However, the organization protests against the persecution, calling those arrested "martyrs of the movement."
The group's motto reads: "We are Anonymous. Our name is legion. We do not forgive. We don't forget. Wait for us".
LulzSec (short for Lulz Security) was formed shortly after the HBGary Federal hack in 2011 and was originally an affiliate of Anonymous. The main driving force of the group was seven people who chose the phrase "Laughing at your safety since 2011" as their motto.
The group carried out the first attack on Fox.com, stealing several passwords, LinkedIn accounts and the names of 73,000 participants in the X-Factor show. In 2011 they went one step further by hacking the CIA website.
LulzSec is famous for the large organizations they target and the snarky messages they leave on websites after they've been hacked. Some experts regard the organization's activity as pranking rather than a real threat, but the group's members claim that they are capable of more serious steps.
In 2011, the group released a "50 Days of Lulz" statement in which they announced they were disbanding. However, on July 18, they launched another attack on newspapers owned by the News Corporation holding, filling them with fake news about the death of company owner Rupert Murdoch.
In 2012, the FBI arrested the main members following a denunciation by the group's leader, Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu. According to prosecutor Sandeep Patel, the hackers lacked Anonymous's political ambitions and imagined themselves to be "modern pirates."
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has openly stated that it supports the government of current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Their main target is the political opposition and Western websites, especially news resources and human rights organizations.
The group's relationship with the Syrian government is not very clear. On the official website, the SEA calls itself "a group of young Syrian enthusiasts who cannot calmly respond to the distortion of facts about the recent uprisings." Some experts believe that hackers may indeed receive funding from the authorities.
The main SEA methods are spam, defacement, phishing and malware distribution. Often, hackers replace a company's web page with messages in support of the current government or an image of the Syrian flag.
The Syrians have already managed to hack into the Facebook pages of Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as the Twitter accounts of news agencies and IT companies. At the same time, the messages that they leave after being hacked vary greatly in style: among them there are both serious and openly political, and ironic ones.
September 19 is International Pirate Day. the site decided today to tell its readers about the modern colleagues of filibusters - about hackers.
To begin with, it is worth denoting the meaning of this term. " Hack" - in English once meant a lot of concepts with the general meaning of "cutting off something abruptly." There were more nuances. Then "hacking" became a simple computer hooliganism.
A "hacker" is a hacker of websites and servers. A person who uses his skill for various, sometimes unseemly purposes. Now it is an industry for some, and a lifestyle for others. The latter prefer to call themselves not "hackers", but "hackers", this is a whole international community. They hack networks for sport and, leaving, often “patch holes”. "Clean" hackers not only do no harm, but also benefit by pointing to weak spots in system. And often they do it disinterestedly. Sometimes, and at the request of the owner of the network, who wants to know these very weak points.
The most famous hacker attacks in the history of the Internet
Kevin Mitnick and the Pentagon. This American is probably the most famous hacker in the world, thanks in large part to the penchant for eccentric behavior that the idle public would expect from him. During his arrest in 1995, Mitnick categorically stated that he only had to whistle into the handset of a street pay phone to untie nuclear war.
In reality, of course, he could not do anything of the kind, because, even though he really hacked into many secure networks, he used not some brilliant programs and supernatural codes for this, but banal methods of social engineering: in other words, the human factor. Mitnick used not so much some technical skills as knowledge of psychology and manipulated people, forcing them to give out their passwords.
Mitnick hacked into the Pentagon on a computer with a processor less than 2 megahertz
Mitnick began practicing hacking various systems from childhood. It is known that at the age of 12 he found a way to forge bus tickets, which allowed him to travel around the city for free. Then he "intercepted" control of the voice communication system at the local McAvto diner in order to tell all sorts of nasty things to visitors.
At the age of sixteen, Mitnick hacked into the Digital Equipment Corporation network and stole the software hosted there: this cost him a year in prison and three years under police supervision. It was at this time that he broke into the Pacific Bell voice mail system and, after a warrant was issued for his arrest, went on the run.
As a student, Mitnick used a TRS-80 computer to penetrate the global network ARPANet, the predecessor of the Internet, and through a computer at the University of Los Angeles reached the US Department of Defense servers. The hack was fixed, the young cybercriminal was quickly found, and as a result, he served six months in a correctional center for youth.An interesting fact: he did it on a computer with a processor less than 2 megahertz.
In 1999, the FBI agents who captured Mitnick claimed that he had false documents and mobile phones with "cloned" numbers. He was ultimately charged with hacking into several computer and telephone networks and sentenced to 46 months in prison plus 22 months for violating probation; while the joke about nuclear war cost him eight months in solitary confinement.
Kevin Mitnick was released from prison in 2003 and has since written several books about his hacking endeavors. In 2000, the film Track Down was released, based on his biography written by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff, with Shimomura being a computer systems expert whose computer was hacked by Mitnick. Today, Mitnick is 49 years old and runs his own computer security company.
Jonathan James and NASA. American Jonathan James is the first juvenile hacker convicted in the United States for cybercrime. According to the prosecution, at the age of 15 in 1999, he hacked into the computer system of his own school, the network of the telecommunications company Bell South, and then penetrated the server of the US Department of Defense. Here, he intercepted more than 3,000 emails from government officials, hacked into a NASA server, and stole software designed to manage life support systems on the International Space Station.
In 2000, James was arrested, however, due to his young age, he was found guilty on two counts in juvenile court and thanks to this he avoided actual imprisonment. Instead, he spent six months under house arrest and sent written apologies to the Pentagon and NASA. If James were two years older, he would have faced at least ten years in prison.
Jonathan James Hacked NASA at 15
Meanwhile, a few years later, Jonathan James became suspected of another computer crime: in 2007, credit card information of millions of TJX customers was stolen, and the Secret Service searched James's house, trying to find evidence linking him to this crime.
Despite never being charged, James was sure he would go to jail and (according to the official story) committed suicide. In a note he left, he stated that he did not believe in the justice system and saw suicide the only way maintain control of the situation and avoid punishment for a crime he did not commit. In interviews that James gave prior to the theft of TJX customer data, he announced his intention to open his own computer security firm. Instead, at the age of 24, he committed suicide.
Kevin Poulsen and radio station KIIS-FM. Another former hacker who changed his occupation, like Mitnick, to a safer one. In the 1980s, Poulsen specialized in hacking telephone lines and manipulated the numbers and channels of different operators with ease. Poulsen first became known under the pseudonym Dark Dante in 1993 after hacking into the telephone line management system of the Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM. As a result of skillful blocking of lines, he became the winner of several competitions and, as the 102nd caller, “won” a Porsche 944 S2.
Poulsen is now a senior editor at Wired magazine.
Poulsen came to the attention of the FBI after breaking into secret databases containing information on wiretapping. In one of the Unsolved Mysteries documentary television programs dedicated to unsolved crimes, his face flashed, but immediately after that, inexplicably, all the telephone lines of the NBC television channel went out of order, so that no one could get through and identify Poulsen.
Nevertheless, the hunt, announced by the FBI, bore fruit: one of the employees of the supermarket recognized Poulsen and blocked him in the aisle of the store. Kevin was charged with hacking telephone networks and money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison, after which he was banned from touching computers for three years.
After his release from prison in 1998, Poulsen turned to journalism and today serves as senior editor of the online version of the famous magazine about computer technology Wired.
Sven Olaf Kamphius and Spamhaus Project. The Dutch-born owner of Pirate Bay hosting provider CyberBunker and a prominent figure in the German Pirate Party was arrested by Spanish police in April 2013 after a series of powerful cyber attacks that some claimed threatened the entire internet. The fact is that the already mentioned company CyberBunker and CB3ROB, also owned by Kamphius, hosted not only torrent trackers, but also botnets, spammers and other suspicious enterprises.
Camphius carried out an attack that threatened the entire Internet
A massive DDoS attack on the Spamhaus Project servers followed after the computer security firm blacklisted CyberBunker and CB3ROB. In response, Kamphius announced the creation of the STOPhaus group, which, according to him, included hackers not only from the United States, Canada and Western Europe, but also from Russia, Ukraine and China. According to the prosecution, by multiplying requests through the DNS resolvers of different providers, the STOPhaus group managed to bombard Spamhaus Project servers with requests at a speed of more than 300 Gb / s, which significantly slowed down the entire Internet.
After his arrest, Kamphius stated that he had nothing to do with this attack and that he only publicly represented the STOPhaus group, but did not participate in its activities. According to him, the damage from the attack on the Spamhaus Project is generally exaggerated many times over. He calls himself an Internet activist and a fighter against censorship and all those who try to control the Internet.
Gary McKinnon and the US Department of Defense. This Scotsman is the most famous British hacker, whose extradition has been sought by the United States since the beginning of the 2000s, where he faces more than 70 years in prison. UK police first became interested in McKinnon in 2002, but thanks to public support and some other circumstances, he is still at large.
In the US, McKinnon is accused of hacking nearly a hundred computers belonging to the Department of Defense and NASA in 2001. According to the authorities, having gained access to the system, he deleted critical files and effectively paralyzed the operation of the US military network for a whole day. Moreover, McKinnon allegedly erased US weapons data from hacked computers after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and stole some critical information. According to the laws in force in the UK for such offenses, he was entitled to only a six-month sentence.
McKinnon himself claimed to have searched US military computers for evidence of withholding information about UFOs and other potentially useful technologies from the public. In addition, he claimed to have gained access to completely unprotected machines and left a lot of records about all the vulnerabilities found on the same computers.
In November 2002, a federal court in the US state of Virginia officially accused McKinnon of seven facts of computer crimes, and if the UK had extradited him to the United States, the cracker could well have spent his whole life in prison. After the entry into force of the Extradition Act of 2003, it seemed that the fate of the hacker was sealed, but that was not the case. The only change was that he was required to report daily to the police station and not leave the house at night.
Sting, Boris Johnson, Stephen Fry spoke out in support of McKinnon
The defense insisted on a medical examination of McKinnon, and he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (a form of autism) and clinical depression, capable of provoking suicide. On this basis, McKinnon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which initially suspended the extradition, but then refused to block it. In 2009, the Supreme Court issued a permit for extradition, but the public outcry of the case led to the fact that it never took place. Many famous personalities spoke out in support of the hacker - from musicians Sting and Peter Gabriel to London Mayor Boris Johnson and actor Stephen Fry.
In October 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May announced that McKinnon's extradition would be blocked on the grounds that if extradited, the risk to the defendant's life (he could commit suicide) was so great that such a decision would be contrary to human rights. In the future, it was decided to abandon the criminal prosecution of the hacker in the UK: formally, due to difficulties with evidence located in the United States. Now McKinnon is absolutely free.
Vladimir Leivn and Citibank. The Russian hacker who in 1994 withdrew $12 million from the Citуbank system. Most of the money was returned to their rightful owners, but the $250,000 was never found. An interesting fact is that at the time of the crime, in our country there were no articles in the criminal code providing for punishment for cybercrimes, so Levin was extradited to the United States and was in custody for 3 years.
Levin withdrew $12 million from Citúbank in 1994
Vasily Gorshkov, Alexey Ivanov and Paypal. Russian hackers who were "active Internet users" in the noughties. These Russian guys were able to hack PayPal, Western Union, and more. In total, the guys hacked 40 American companies in 10 states. In 2003, Gorshkov was sentenced to 3 years in prison and a fine of $700,000. And Ivanov was caught and convicted in 2004, sentenced to 4 years in prison. The trial also took place in the United States.
The most famous hacker groups
Lizard Squad
The first media mention of Lizard Squad came after they shut down the League of Legends and Call of Duty game servers. More serious attacks followed, targeting the Sony Playstation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live. One gets the impression that the representatives of this group have a personal dislike for Sony. In August 2014, they even posted on Twitter a threat to blow up the plane carrying the president of Sony Online Entertainment. Fortunately, the aircraft made an emergency landing and there were no casualties.
In addition, Lizard Squad claims to be connected to the Islamic State. For example, after the attack on Malaysia Airlines, hacktivists posted on the company's website the message "Hacked by Lizard Squad - the official Cyber Caliphate. ISIS will win." And a few months earlier, they had placed ISIS flags on Sony's servers. However, it is likely that the group's activities have no political overtones, and the mention of ISIS is only necessary for it to attract the attention of the media.
Following the December attacks on PSN and Xbox Live, UK and US law enforcement agencies launched a major joint investigation that resulted in the arrest of a 22-year-old man from Twickenham and a teenager from Southport, alleged members of the Lizard Squad.
Anonymous
Anonymous is arguably the most famous hacker group of all time. It is a decentralized online community of tens of thousands of hacktivists, for whom computer attacks are a way of expressing protest against social and political phenomena. The group became famous after numerous attacks on government, religious and corporate websites. It attacked the Pentagon, threatened to smash Facebook, destroy the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, and declared war on Scientology.
In 2010, Anonymous organized a large-scale action "Retribution" (Operation Payback), bringing down attacks on Visa, MasterCard and PayPal systems. The reason is their refusal to process payments for the site WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange. In 2011, hacktivists publicly supported the Occupy Wall Street movement against social and economic inequality by attacking the New York Stock Exchange website.
In 2010, Anonymous launched attacks on Visa, MasterCard and PayPal systems.
Since 2009, dozens of people have been arrested for involvement in Anonymous activities in the US, UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey. Representatives of the group condemn such persecution and call their caught like-minded people martyrs. Hacktivist motto: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. Wait for us".
LulzSec
LulzSec (abbreviation Lulz Security) is an organization that "for fun" attacked the servers of companies that were considered the most secure. Initially, it consisted of seven members, working under the motto "Laughing at your safety since 2011." The date was not chosen by chance: in 2011, Anonymous, already famous at that time, carried out a major attack on HBGary Federal. Later, this incident topped the ranking of the most high-profile cybercrimes according to Forbes magazine. The name of the hacker group - "Lulz" - is derived from LOL (Laughing Out Loud).
LulzSec's first attacks included stealing the passwords of Fox.com, LinkedIn, and 73,000 X Factor contestants. In 2011, they compromised the accounts of users of the Sony Pictures resource and disabled the official website of the CIA.
After successful attacks, LulzSec traditionally left biting messages on the resources, as a result of which some experts tend to consider them more Internet pranksters than serious cyber warriors. However, the representatives of the group themselves declared that they were capable of more.
In June 2011, LulzSec issued a notice of self-dissolution. However, a month later, hackers made another attack - this time on the News Corporation newspaper. They hacked The Sun's website and posted on the front page news of the death of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.
The core members of LulzSec were arrested in 2012. The FBI informant was the 28-year-old leader of the group, Hector Xavier Monsegur, who had the network name Sabu. In his speech, prosecutor Sandeep Patel noted that the hackers were not politically motivated like Anonymous and called them "pirates of the day."
Syrian Electronic Army
The purpose of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacker group is to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Attackers most often target political opposition groups, human rights organizations, and Western news sites.
The nature of the group's connection to the Syrian government remains unclear. On its website, the SEA describes itself as "a group of young Syrian enthusiasts who cannot remain indifferent to the widespread misrepresentation of the uprising in Syria." Meanwhile, a number of experts claim that the organization operates under the control of the Syrian government.
Among the techniques used by SEA are traditional DDoS attacks, spamming, phishing and virus distribution. On the main page of the attacked site, they usually place political messages and the Syrian flag. The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Daily Express, Forbes, Chicago Tribune, CBC, La Repubblica and some other publications have already become victims of Syrian computer scientists. Members of the Syrian Electronic Army also attacked the Facebook accounts of Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy.
High technologies, coding information and solving mysteries are the main interests of modern hackers in the world. Most of them prefer to remain in the shadows, because the nicknames of hackers are often hidden, in other cases, almost nothing is known about the life of active network users. But still there is a certain number of hackers who are known to the whole world.
Popular American hackers and their nicknames
The researchers compiled their list of the most advanced hackers in America. Among the most popular was Dark Dante. The nickname of the hacker is translated as "dark Dante", which was worn by American Kevin Poulsen. Today the guy is called "honorary retired hacker." His main specialization is hacking telephone lines.
At one time, Kevin won a Porsche, which was played on the air of the radio station KIIS-FM, due to his ability to cheat the system. On the other hand, he also engaged in an active network search for individuals who were looking for pornographic videos on the network. Unfortunately, Poulsen did not stop there and decided to prove his abilities to the whole world by infiltrating the FBI database. After that, he was sentenced to 5 years. And today Kevin works as an editor of one of the American magazines and often describes his hacker exploits.
C0mrade is another alias for a hacker, which means “comrade” in English. Its owner Jonathan James is famous for his criminal biography. And he was convicted at the age of 16 for the malicious code that he posted on the server of the US Department of Defense. Interestingly, in 1999, Jonathan attacked the NASA databases for the first time, for the protection of which the management spent more than 1.7 million dollars. After that, the guy was convicted. However, in 2007, a scandal thundered again: someone stole data from customers' credit cards and suspicions fell on the former hacker. He failed to prove his innocence to the person involved, so he found the only way out and shot himself in the same year.
Homeless hacker has become another netizen famous for his abilities. In translation, the nickname for a hacker means "homeless hacker", since Adrian Lamo almost always used public computers, which made it extremely difficult to figure him out. At one time, he hacked the Yahoo! search engine, the server of the Bank of America and was even able to access data The New York Times. As punishment, Adrian paid a $65,000 fine and spent several years under house arrest. Today the guy is one of America's famous journalists.
Nicky Russian hackers
Nicknames of hackers from Russia are often recognizable at first sight. The most popular of them is Magg, which belongs to Alexei Belan. In 2012, he hacked the networks of large American companies and also used the personal data of employees. To this day, Belan has not been found, and his trail has been lost in Athens. Perhaps today the hacker is in Russia.
The nicknames of hackers in the world are often united by hacker groups and have a single name, like, for example, the names of hackers in one of the Russian groups - Fancy Bear, which means "unusual bear." Interestingly, its members are credited with collaborating with the Kremlin. At one time, they attacked US defense sites.
Also, the Fancy Bear group is associated with direct interference in the election of the President of America. And in 2016, they were accused of cyberattacking Macron's election state.
The most famous hacker groups
Today the world knows the most active hacker groups: Anonymous, Lizard Squad and The Lulz Boat. One of the well-known hacker structures is Anonymous, which means “anonymous”, which has been operating since 2003. This is an international organization that does not have a single control center. Since 2015, they have become associated with cyberterrorists, and the Times magazine noted that Anonymous is one of the most influential organizations in the world.
Lizard Squad is another group of hackers. It means "team of lizards". It was founded in 2014, but despite the fact that it lasted for about 6 months, it has become one of the most famous in the world. This organization is known for repeated attacks on the game servers Destini, League of Legends. Initially, their actions were not taken seriously, but in the future it became known that Lizard Squad actively shared posts in support of ISIS and the DPRK. Today, most of the participants are under arrest for acts of fraud and unauthorized access to servers.
The Lulz Boat is one of the three most famous hacker groups. Was founded in 2011. Translated, the band's nickname means "laughing boat". They gained access to Sony user accounts, and also attacked the website of the US Senate and police structures. Already in 2012, most of the participants were arrested. But it is also interesting that almost all the information regarding the activities of The Lulz Boat was leaked to the police by the leader of this hacker group, Hector Xavier, since he was recruited by the authorities back in 2011.
Single hackers and their groups have recently become commonplace for most network users. Large companies are actively involved in the protection of personal data even today, but every day it becomes known about new cyber attacks on servers. Nicknames of hackers are often not disclosed and remain only in the personal files of hackers, however, information about the most famous and dexterous is leaked online from their fans, followers, or even accomplices.
