Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe
Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe
Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it. The international hacker community is preparing to strike against U.S. infrastructure and calls for public awareness against incoming fascism
Anything supposedly said by "Anonymous" as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate "outlets" for their statements... but there's also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit "anon news outlets" and little script kiddies running around. It's important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more "serious" factions.
Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you're in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.
No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It's been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there's the fact that more than one of them have "serious black hat hacker" backgrounds.
Going to be one wild ride.
little script kiddies running around
Yeah, they're running around the Treasury Dept right now.
It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security
Having worked with government agencies and a lot of large private organizations the thing that keeps them mostly secure is the amount of red tape involved with things. Patching a production system requires a teleconference with at least five different people and no one person knows everything.
The idiots without any security experience coming in to "streamline" things will just make the systems even more fragile and insecure.
Known and vetted systems are always the most secure. Until RSA is broken, and then they'll need to update to a quantum resilient standard. Which we've had in the wild for 6 years already and the NIST has officially approved for 2 years.
We're still at least a decade away from a machine with enough qbits to do it. So i feel like we should be fine.
It's the fucking Credit Bureaus, Telecoms, and Energy Companies I worry about. They keep fucking up.
I don't know about government overall, but the military and HHS have has some of the most stringent security stances I've encountered. To the point where just working for them was a massive chore. (How effective they were I guess I don't know, but working for them sucked.)
That said, I'll take what you said on faith, because I think you're spot on with everything else.
Often, ridiculous and onerous procedural security is hiding massively incompetent actual software security or is used to constrain people from discovering security by obscurity holes. Everything I've done in government interfacing as a vendor would seem to confirm this, at least back when I was doing it a few years ago. You'd be hard pressed to convince me it's changed much since.
I once answered a phone call inside a com closet on base. Military IT was already escorting me. Security came because the cameras in the closet detected the camera on my phone. It's definitely physically tight security.
That said, I’ll take what you said on faith, because I think you’re spot on with everything else.
I mean, it's not a secret that governments everywhere run really outdated software (think things like Windows 7 and older) because "it works", so it really shouldn't be too surprising.
I had to help the SSA implement SAML authentication once and they weren't even allowed to share their screen so I could see what they were doing. Totally agree that it's a massive chore.
Yeah. I've only spent a few moments skimming through the linked article but if you were part of a legitimate hacktivism group planning a significant operation why would you publish this statement ?
It's really just spooky hyperbole - as though written by an adolescent that want's to sound scary and powerful.
I would absolutely love to see hacktivists cause some chaos, and maybe even some real financial harm.
The whole point is to being attention to the rise of fascism. Hacking without releasing a statement like this is just terrorism. Releasing a statement after hacking can make it easier for the govt to cover up, like "no we weren't hacked, someone in our server room just accidentally tripped over a power cable"
I guess its pointless to believe their words since there is no way to know if its them. Just look at what they actually do and judge based on that.
It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs
I've seen Muni and Regional gov and also dotcoms.
The Govs I've been at were crazy-tight about security. They were unionized and could decide based on conscience vs costs. Dotcoms, though, followed a different trending, one that really focused on costs.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops
Any examples or sources for me to learn more about these? The only Anonymous news I've heard of since the early days is updates on Kirtaner.
Can they do something useful like destroy the debt infrastructure and delete all student loans and medical bills?
Anonymous tends to not do useful things. They just talk a lot.
“Anonymous” isn’t like a formal group. The entire point is that anyone can say that they are anonymous. So yeah, people talk a lot. You can do whatever you like as anonymous.
mostly they are spending hours scrolling through social media accounts of certain types of people looking for dox materials. that's really about it
A more useful thing would be to do as much damage to Twitter as possible. In fact, why they haven't attacked Twitter while Musk has been disarming all of its safety protocols is fucking beyond me.
I'm sure backups and redundancies are "inefficient" since "everything is in the cloud, anyway".
Will it be like when they launched a load of DDoS attacks against Sony, of which the only impact was annoying regular people and doing nothing to the company they were supposedly going after?
They have always been techno-punks: anti-establishment and more style than substance. That being said, if nothing else, they were able to shine a light on shitty people and that's more than most folks do.
I wish they were getting into organizations and dumping gigs of documents detailing illegal and anti-consumer/citizen activities, but money and law enforcement really goes after anything with an actually impact that might affect wealth. No one actually gives a shit about a website being down. (Excepting like... Amazon or Google and good fucking luck with that.)
So it's like a flaming bag of shit left on a porch. They take care of it and shout "you damn punks!" But if you burn the barn down, every cop in the county will be interrogating everyone they can find until you are caught.
You prob complain about protesters disrupting regular people too
"Bloody Just Stop Oil protesters blocking the road, preventing me to go to work just so they can spread the message that we're all going to die! I HAVE A MORTGAGE!"
They're all talk and no bite. The world needs fsociety
The world fsociety brought about was shit
The final season they steal all of the money the ruling elites had been using to control the world, ending their grip on society.
Could also be argued that the dark army did the most evil shit and the government siding with the deus group rather than taking the side of the citizens is why things spiraled after wiping out the debt history of everyone.
Elon and the other people pulling the strings on society losing all their money would not be a bad thing for civilization at all
By all means do. It's not like much of value is lost at this point.
Tomorrow
Trump: By executive order, I dismantle the computer warfare and defence division
Musk: It doesn't exist anymore!
The day after
Anonymous: They turned off their service that sanitized all inputs. We just stole everything from every department, and put cats on every governments webpage.
"The government had both server and client side validation, which is totally wasteful and inefficient! I removed both and may the best one win!"
Elmo, DOGE
Well I hope they choose their targets right, otherwise it'll just make everything worse.
That's kind of inevitable right now. The most important thing is making sure Trump and the GOP get the blame. Well, them or Russia.
Actually, the best targets aren't the government. It's big business.
That's gonna be a big ask. Republicans don't even get the blame for the things they do themselves. Oligarch propaganda is everywhere and pernicious, look at how the average working class American has accepted the notion that low level bureaucrats are the reason they're poor.
They’ll blame it on Obama, Hillary, Biden, communism, LGBTQ, Black people, immigrants, etc.
They never take the blame - there’s always an ‘other’ to demonize.
This is kinda what trump wants. If the government cant handle "online stuff" they can pitch privatization. It hurts more if tech megacorps get hacked. Though at this point I wou'd laugh if a bunch of internet nerds got the nuclear codes or locked up a bunch of satellites
If the government cant handle "online stuff" they can pitch privatization.
It kind of already is privatized. Most of the government's cyber security efforts are handled by defense contractors.
CISA actually monitored Internet traffic and would contact government entities (local, schools, universities, etc) when they were being attacked. I went to a talk once where they said they usually had response times in minutes, and it would take longer to figure out who they needed to alert and convince them that it was real. Now that CISA is gutted I would expect more and worse breaches in the future.
Imagine if one nuclear head was pointed to every megacorp headquarters in the US.
Don't point at the HQs, point at their mansions / golf courses / private islands
Ceo residences would do better. Force them all to live in the office hellscape they created.
Ah, Anonymous—the digital equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. Trump’s America? Weakness isn’t new—it’s baked into the propaganda circus we’ve called democracy since Reagan. You think script kiddies and Elon’s crypto-bros “hacking fascism” will fix anything? Please. The real op is watching tech oligarchs and politicians collude while we argue about which flavor of dystopia we’re slurping.
Infrastructure attacks? Bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it works out when grandma’s dialysis machine gets bricked by some edgelord’s Python script. If you want revolution, stop fetishizing IRC nostalgia and touch grass. Until then, this is just digital graffiti on a burning trash barge.
I'm not going to write off hacktivism so quickly.
Even if it's just a few defaced websites now and then, that's a whole lot more effective than any other sort of activism I've seen to date.
Even a god king bleeds
Oh, sure, let’s romanticize hacktivism, the digital equivalent of spray-painting a slogan on a collapsing wall. A few defaced websites? That’s your bar for effectiveness? The oligarchs aren’t losing sleep over a 404 page; they’re too busy consolidating power while you cheer for digital vandalism like it’s the French Revolution.
Real change doesn’t come from poking at the system with a keyboard and hoping it flinches. If anything, these stunts just give them more excuses to tighten the noose—more surveillance, more control.
You want to fight the machine? Build something better. Organize. Create infrastructure that can’t be co-opted. Until then, hacktivism is just a tantrum dressed up as resistance.
Anonymous, if you are going to do it, PLEASE make sure to leave the innocent people alone and go after the rich assholes that are doing this.
Other than that, here's my axe, go wild
Go vandalize Tom Tillis' website. That'll be your first test.
No one is innocent here.
As much and as little that anonymous means, because of the name, because of what the name implies, because of what they do, claim they do, and well, we don't know what they do... As much as all of that is true, it's AWESOME to hear from them again, if it is them...
I can't wait to see "real" anonymous actions again, lord knows we can use it
Genuine question, was it ever anything more than a bunch of 4chaners and script kiddies?
I wanna see some more fax spamming.
Lol what even is a "real Anonymous"
Its like "Antifa", its not an organization, its an idea.
Don't need to open Twitter to watch it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI27LEimfYg
I'm also remembering an IT crowd scene where they argue about which of them is in Anonymous, and I can't find it now. Does anyone have a link handy? Unless I am misremembering
It was the very final episode. Sort of a special. That wrapped up the series. Sometimes referred to as season 5. The name of the episode is the internet is coming.
Do it, attack America's life points directly.
No, my Blue Eyes White Aryan!
Aren’t they kind of notorious for empty promises?
Its more of a chaos entity. Because anyone can be a part of it with literally no steps other than saying "I am Anonymous", anyone can say or do anything. As a result, one person or group may claim Anonymous while doing a legitimate hack, while another person who is just a script kiddie won't ever actually do anything and you get this hot and cold, will they won't they effect as a result.
Getting attention is a big part of it
Sounds like ISIS. Lots of people claiming to be members.
The actual anonymous group gets things done.
How easy is it to say Anonymous said this or that? Very.
I expect this highly political, left leaning anonymous isn't real. It's such BS...
Agreed.
My final semester in American Sign Language was "Sex, Drugs, and Profanity," and most of the signs are just exactly what you'd guess. (I held on to those textbooks.) Plus, facial expressions are a big part of the grammar of the language. I don't recognize this scene, but assuming it's from a comedy - it's probably also not far off from accurate.
It's from the 1982 film Airplane 2: the Sequel. Nowhere near as funny as the original, but still very funny.
hack the planet
Oh wow. They'll shut down a website for a day.
Whoop-tee-doo.
If they actually gave a shit about spreading awareness, they’d find a way to get that video on Fox News, OANN, etc
V for vendetta shit
Hit the Government of Putin where it hurts.
I will believe it when I see it this is likely just talk.
Anytime I see something about "Anonymous" I just assume it's some kind of fed psyop until proven otherwise.
So you'll go to your grave believing it because all the proof in the world will just be fake news
That's how you win asymmetric warfare.
Exploit it? The EU thinks they can exploit the chaos? What are they going to do, give us universal health care, a strong safety net, consumer protections, renewable energy and TRAINNNNNNSSSSSSS? (Please, oh please)
Just brush the Funyun crumbs off of your shirt before starting.
Lol this is hilarious. I don't know which "anonymous" they spoke to, but it definitely wasn't the actual subversionist hackers that know how to do shit.
yeah ddos a website with your low orbit ion canons. that'll teach them for sure. q0wned. thank you
Anonymous is going to attack the American people's infrastructure?
No, they are going to talk a bunch then so nothing. It's their whole thing.
Anonymous is bored again? Oh, okay.
I'm all for attacking infra - we need to make this shit more resilient and we need to transition to memory-safe langs like Rust. This will hopefully accelerate it. Also, I lol at people saying Trump/Elon/Doge will destroy the US when in reality - these kinds of people who wanna attack it probably have way better chances to do so.
Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn't protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn't protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn't protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn't protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.
"Infrastructure", to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I'm thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/hardware/allen-bradley/programmable-controllers.html.
Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven't been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it's up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.
PLCs tend to be coded up in "ladder logic" and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn't a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there's a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and "supported by manufacturer" is critical for these industries.
Take my upvote!!!
All of this is true, but we will eventually have to migrate to Rust. Will probably take decades tho. Rust is absolutely not a silver bullet, but will help in certain cases.
If you're an American praising potential harm to America you should reexamine why you continue being a citizen here. If there are other countries more aligned with your personal morals and values please seek citizenship there.
I am, because this government has decided the US constitution just doesn't matter, and now, we have literal nazis running the government.
I stand by my people, not the government oppressing them.
Sure, lemme know where you're dropping the case of cash at so I can afford to GTFO.
The harm is already here, idiot.
That's why there's a traitorous felon squatting in the White House.
Sorry, you're stuck with hoards of people our economy has made too poor to get citizenship elsewhere. Shitty country run by selfish oligarchs. 🤷
Our country hasn't "made them too poor for citizenship elsewhere" as millions still walk hundreds to thousands of miles to get here. Still more opportunity in the USA than anywhere else. Sure we live under an oligarchy but honestly who doesn't?
Tell that to the people that occurred to place the orange turd in the White House.
"America is becoming fascist" makes me cringe.
It cannon become something that it has been for a long time. US was fascist under Clinton, Bush, Obama, first Trump admin, Biden and it keeps on the same track now. It's less than useless rallying cry when US foreing policy alone in the past 70 years is a realworld example of the thought experiment of "what would have happened if nazi-germany had won WW2". Genocide, war, coup, and dictatorship galore committed by the United States, especially after the 80s.
In the end what this narrative is about is that precarious middle class liberals fear that even more of the practices that US has been spreading around the world are now coming home and now the US government will gut it's own people instead of some foreigners. Even this isn't unprecedented and at worst Trump can only make things worse for some, but for many what they fear is already reality.
Makes me really think if this "Anonymous cell" has any real grass-roots basis or if it's just the same coup-mongers hiding behind thin leftist veneer to just jump against Trump, who they see as destructive loose cannon to their operations, not as an real opponent. Nothing new for Anonymous name being used in this way btw. Where were they under Biden?
Don't bother with this troll. They are a fake account made a day ago to rile decent.
To the indigenous people, the US has always been fascist.
Exploit it you say? Please get in line behind the russians, the chinese snd pretty much all arab countries
What did we do? As if our governments aren’t US vassals? Yet you still demonize us. If Arab governments had any sway our governments wouldn’t be paying tributes and forced to normalize with Israel and host US troops.
The only foreign country that controls US politics and bought US politicians from both major parties is Israel. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt have been caught spying on the US (or US citizens) from what I know
Next time a blonde haired blue eyed British man named Lawrence comes asking you to rebel against the Ottomans you'll think twice, huh
The Saudis did not give the Jared billions for nothing. Just remember, the Saudis and Israelis told Bush to invade Iraq and next up is Iran with Putin's Sock Puppet in charge. It will be a massive cluster fuck.
Iran, for one example, is a prolific cybersecurity adversary of the USA. One of the top four advesaries alongside China, North Korea and Russia. In fact, Iran is believed to be responsible for disclosing a CIA covert channel to China which led to a critical dismantling of CIA assets. I don't know as much about other Arab states because Iran is most famous for its advanced cyber-warfare capabilities, but honestly, to avoid exploiting the USA would be very foolish.
Obviously this goes both ways. Israel and the USA are infamous for Stuxnet, a computer virus which reportedly destroyed a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges in the early 2000s.
You say that as if Iran hasn't been financing uprisings, Turkey isn't openly affectionate with multiple opposing world powers, and as if Afghanistan didn't fall into chaos literally as the USA were leaving.
Yes, that's how exploiting works in those videos.
Don’t forget the billionaires too.
What makes you think Anonymous isn't filled with the russians, chinese, and pretty much all arab countries?
If it's not card carrying white republicans hacking America, we're going to have a problem with it.