#ANON DDOS TOOLS SERIES#

On December 9, Dutch officials arrested a 16 year old boy in The Hague and charged him with taking part in the attacks. To date, there has only been one arrest directly linked to the DDoS attacks in defense of WIkileaks. So even for those who are no longer actively participating in an attack, there is still a record of them having done so in the past. International data retention laws require that commercial Internet providers store Internet usage data for at least six months. And that could make them targets of prosecution now or in the future. That means users who decided to weigh in on behalf of Anonymous were doing so without enjoying anonymity, themselves. But researchers found that the LOIC tool itself has no built in mechanism for obscuring a user’s IP address. Savvy Internet users may avoid detection by running the LOIC tool through an anonymization service that conceals their IP address, such as Tor. In essence, the automatic option allows users to voluntarily join a botnet. However, the tool may also be used automatically, where a user runs the program on their computer, but allows third parties to control it, utilizing their computing resources to launch DDoS attacks remotely. The tool can be controlled manually, where the target and method of attack are determined by the user and launched from their personal computer.

Denial of service attacks were Anonymous’s weapon of choice, with LOIC providing a way for non-technical users to take part in the attacks.Īnonymous uses a modified version of the tool with two modes of operation. Most anti malware firms categorize LOIC as a hacking tool and will warn of its presence on systems they protect.Īnonymous, a loose affiliation of hackers and online libertarian activists has engaged in a spirited online defense of Wikileaks since payments vendors and others began taking steps to isolate the organization. The tool allows the user to select a target, a method of attack as listed above, and ways to customize the specific request.

#ANON DDOS TOOLS SERIES#

The program works by sending a series Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests to a target host. The LOIC was initially developed as a stress testing application. That could allow authorities to round up DDoS participants merely by analyzing the source of the junk traffic their computers sent to target Web pages, including those of Paypal, Mastercard and Visa. Researchers from the University of Twente, Netherlands, looked at the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), a DDoS tool being used by the umbrella group Anonymous and found that the tool fails to shield the Internet Protocol (IP) address of computers running the tool, according to a published research paper. A new study finds that a tool used to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of whistle blower Web site Wikileaks may, itself, leak the identity of those running the software.

Anon ddos tools