We Are Anonymous - Parmy

 

Most of us consider the internet to be a fascinating place to conduct business, catch up on news, talk with friends, learn, shop, and be entertained.  Being connected forms a significant portion of our lives. And unless you are specifically in the computer business as an IT professional, a programmer, or computer security specialist you probably only pay attention to the advice to change your password during your company’s annual security training.  Worse than changing your password, checking your computer for viruses typically involves fighting with programs that scan your computer which are as disruptive (perhaps more so) than the viruses we probably have silently  running in the background of our systems as we speak.  And of course we all wonder, each time we swipe our credit cards, if this will be the time our numbers will turn up for sale on some black-market list.  Most of us have heard there is a seedy underbelly of the internet, but most of us believe that we are somewhat removed from that underbelly which exists only on the other side of the tracks...the red light district where prostitutes, drug dealers, predators, and other criminals lurk.  If we simply avoid taking that turn off the information superhighway we are not at risk.

Enter Parmy Olson and her book, “We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency”.  As it turns out, the wrong turn you have to take, is no farther away that typing “4chan” into your web browser.  Instantly you are transported into the depths of depravity of the human mind for a single reason...you can remain anonymous.  4chan is an imageboard...one of the first...and within 4chan, specifically on the the 4chan/b/ index, a collective identity was formed dedicated to mischief on the internet.  In the beginning most mischief involved pranks and cyber embarrassment...literally for laughs.  Eventually this anonymous laughter, termed Lultz, required a higher level of achievement.  Eventually embarrassing individuals didn’t provide sufficient laughter and the addiction to laughs drove the search for bigger and better targets.  As it turns out, in order to properly embarrass someone (for laughs) it requires information, planning, and execution.  To be good at it the pranksters had to develop talents that coincidentally resemble the skills of a good hacker.   Individual skills in social engineering, SQL injection, the discovery of vulnerabilities, and the creation of botnet networks, were all available and the imageboard brought these talents together.  Anonymous was born.

Thousands of users accessed the 4chan imageboard...perhaps tens of thousands.  However several users known in the anonymous channels by the chat names of Sabu, Topiary, Kayla, and TFlow, became legendary characters on the imageboard.  Their early exploits developed a loyal following that permitted them to focus the direction of many of these followers to participate in the mayhem that would occur in the name of Anonymous.

Olson, although criticized by ardent computer experts for not being an expert on computer hacking, clearly reports and captures the life of these four Anonymous actors from their early beginnings, through their exploits, and onto their eventual arrest.  She paints an image of the seedy underbelly of the internet that, whereas we do not need the technical details of how it works, we need to know it exists.  We need to know there are legions of computer users who spend their lives trolling the recesses of the internet looking for open doors they can walk through, mostly to find interesting material, like embarrassing photos or credit card numbers they can post for sale.  They do this, not to get rich, but to pay for their computer drug habit (to pay their ISP, buy an new router, or upgrade their laptop), so they can continue to troll and be entertained.  Like teenagers who walk the neighborhood at night, they are bored and not looking to become hardened criminals, but will open a car door and take whatever they find inside.  The more open doors they find the more successful their midnight walk and the more encouraged they become.  This is nothing new.  We should not be surprised this behavior exists on the internet either now, when Matthew Broderick social engineered a computer to play “Global Thermonuclear War” in 1983, or during the peak of the hacking revolution in the 1990s when the “Black Hats” and the “White Hats” developed sides.

By far the random nature of the Anonymous community, while formidable behind a collective cause, should encourage us to change our passwords and not give out hints that can be socially engineered into giving up our sensitive information.  This community remains both anonymous and unorganized.  The greater threat, posed by mature and organized groups of criminal and state sponsored hackers are far more dangerous.  Unfortunately their operations are masked by the sheer number of individuals simply pulling on door handles and jumping fences simply to look in your windows.  The internet can be a mysterious and scary place because of all the anonymous strangers who lurk.  This book takes most of the mystery out of it.  4-Stars for telling a great story and for motivating me to change my password more often.