British Spy Agency GCHQ Performed DDoS Attack Against Hacktivist Anonymous & LulzSec -Snowden Documents Transpired
While excavating the past, it was always found that cyber criminals, large hacker collective groups were the culprits for engaging voluminous denial of service attack. But this widely transfusing story get a one eighty degree reverse turn, when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed another trade secret. Recently a lurid story get spot lighted, as the whistle blower Snowden unfold yet another breathtaking stealthy documents taken from the National Security Agency. The clandestine documents taken the mask from the so called good guys, unveiling British spy agency GCHQ had launched a secret war against the infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous and a splinter group known as LulzSec several years ago. Many of you guessed right, this was happened when Anonymous were targeting various UK companies and government websites. The documents disclose that GCHQ carried out seemingly illegal DDoS attacks against the collective, flooding their chatrooms with so much traffic that they would become inaccessible – and all with the approval of the British government. The revelations come less than a year after several LulzSec activists were jailed by a British court for carrying out similar DDoS attacks against targets including the CIA, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), News International, Sony and the Westboro Baptist Church, among others.
This sensational issue was made public by NBC News deferentially with the help of none other than Edward Snowden. In their exclusive report headed 'War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers,' NBC said -The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.
The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.
The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites.
As soon as this story getting all the spot lights, immediately the GCHQ responded to this saying all their movements and operations were lawful. “All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.” -GCHQ said the press. To know more detail about this story, don't forget to stay tuned with VOGH.
