from Hacker News

Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed Hackers’ IP Addresses

by omfut on 5/9/11, 7:51 PM with 12 comments

  • by SwellJoe on 5/9/11, 10:44 PM

    "Mutiny" has no meaning when there is no authority to which one can object. I don't know what the right word would be here, but it's definitely not "mutiny".

    I also strongly suspect no one of any significance in this story is particularly worried about this exposure. Anyone smart who is participating in potentially illegal activities would be particularly careful about using proxies for sensitive work; and planning is definitely sensitive. I would also assume, were I a participant in Anonymous activities, that any site claiming to be representative of Anonymous has at least a 50% chance of being operated by the FBI or a rogue security company running black hat operations along the lines of HB Gary Federal. It'd be absolutely foolish to connect to such a site directly, and the members of Anonymous who are doing the real heavy lifting are probably not fools.

  • by marshray on 5/10/11, 12:19 AM

    Seems likely there's more going on here than meets the eye. Somebody's playing games. Either:

    1. Anonymous does, in fact, have enough of a centralized leadership that they can pull off this kind of thing as an attention-getting disinformation tactic.

    2. This "rogue admin" is working with the feds as part of some kind of deal. By releasing some info they get some people to panic, drop their defenses, generate chatter, and then they observe who's talking to whom and who's wiping their disks.

    3. What do you know? Anarchists have their power struggles too. Anonymous may fail to maintain enough of an identity to remain relevant.

    4. All of the above.

  • by p4bl0 on 5/9/11, 9:57 PM

    > Mutiny Within Anonymous May Have Exposed A Very Few Hackers And A Lot Of Scriptkiddies' IP Addresses.

    FTFY. (And true hackers would have been behind proxies or using a public wifi network anyway).

  • by ryoshu on 5/10/11, 12:43 AM

    I would be especially concerned about the 127.0.0.1 addresses listed.

  • by awakeasleep on 5/9/11, 11:30 PM

    Better a visible internal betrayal than a long datasuck by an "Advanced Persistent Threat"

    The whole Anonymous thing was getting a little too big, IMO, and needed something like this to fragment it and make the kids involved start thinking about the rest of their lives. I hope a few well meaning but naieve people quit while they're ahead, wipe their disks, and realize that some government agency has probably been tracking them down for a while & that this is a blessing in disguise.

  • by bxr on 5/9/11, 8:41 PM

    >several of the group’s sites had been hacked in a coup d’etat by an administrator who decided that he didn’t like the leaderless command structure that AnonOps Network Admins use.

    Thats poor planning. A coup doesn't work within an structure where the only authority is whoever you feel like going along with today. Then again anonymous is a train-wreck happening again and again powered only by internet drama, so I can't say I'm surprised.