Ejecutan a director de Policía de Santa Catarina

Image by xoque via Flickr

Los hombres armados que le dieron muerte también secuestraron a entre tres y cuatro personas de la policía municipal.

Santa Catarina • El director de la Policía de Tránsito del municipio de Santa Catarina, Germán Pérez Quiroz fue acribillado esta tarde.

Los hombres armados que le dieron muerte también secuestraron a entre tres y cuatro personas del área administrativa.

La policía ya se encuentra en la búsqueda de los responsables.

Laughing at your security – It’s been a long 50-odd days for the Lulz Boat

Laughing at your security – the Lulz Boat.

 

How the media went along for the Lulz Boat ride

27 June 2011 | 13:02 | @arturodetexas

So, the LulzSec hacker group says it has disbanded – but in less than two months they’ve changed the relationship between hackers and the media.

It’s been a long 50-odd days for the Lulz Boat, those fun-loving hackers sailing under the Twitter handle of LulzSec. If you hadn’t gleaned it by now, the name translates as ‘laughing at your security.’

And that’s what the loose collective has been doing.

We’ve seen LulzSec make a mockery of Sony, the US Senate, CIA and FBI pages, countless security firms (maximum lulz there), PBS (who could forget the fake story reporting on rapper Tupac, alive in New Zealand), lots of gaming companies, and their first prominent target, X Factor contestants who found their application and contact details leaked on the web.

But, of course, so-called ‘grey hat’ hacking/cracking attempts aimed at the disruptive outing of poorly secured systems are not new.

And while they initially claimed they were acting just for the laughs, political leanings came into it later on, as they conceded in an interview with the BBC.

But this ‘hacktivist’ slant was also not new – let’s not forget the Anonymous crowd which LulzSec likely spawned from, which itself received widespread attention when engaging in ‘payback’ Denial of Service attacks on companies which acted against WikiLeaks.

No, new was the way in which this hacking group kept the media waiting on their every breach, joke and, importantly, tweet.

Tweeting out announcements, upcoming targets, jokes and more, LulzSec, has almost 282,000 followers at the time of writing – a figure which has rocketed up in recent weeks.

Even the most popular of the Anonymous Twitter accounts can only muster just over 100,000.

And there’s no doubt the half-dozen hackers who make up LulzSec took real interest in the mainstream media’s coverage of their work, as leaked chat logs confirmed last week.

Yet the more they attacked, the more they talked it up, and the more enemies they made.

A number of these are fellow hackers, who for a range of reasons, have fallen foul of the group.

A few weeks back I spoke to a member of the ‘Backtrace Security’ group referenced in the leaked logs – lead LulzSecer Topiary said they should go after Backtrace because they’d dared to attempt to expose them.

This hacker, formerly associated with Anonymous, was angered at LulzSec’s ‘ignorant vigilante nonsense’, and posted alleged names of the core members online months back. Recent chat logs confirmed the hacker names, but the real ones remain unconfirmed.

‘They think they’re invulnerable…but they’re being really, really sloppy’ he said, after claiming to get hold of the information via social engineering.

‘They are very stupidly overconfident.’
 
He claims the FBI approached him for the names, but in the murky world of chat rooms and stage-names, that can’t be confirmed – the FBI have told several media organisations they can’t comment on such investigations.

What’s not in doubt is the risky game being played – LulzSec have taken a lot of joy from tweeting about all the times they’ve supposedly been exposed, only to remain online.

So far, authorities have arrested people who appear to be loose associates of LulzSec at best, and the likely core members – Topiary, Sabu and Kayla included, keep tweeting.

Now, the group says it’s disbanded – and we’re yet to see someone at the centre of the group charged. (including the arrest of a 19 year-old alleged hacker in England last week)

Will the attacks continue?

I asked Murray Goldschmidt of Australia’s Sense of Security how many companies he worked with had faced attempted breaches.

‘I would say all of them’, he answered. ‘But they don’t necessarily know it’

‘They may have already been attacked but don’t have the ability to respond to it.’

Plenty of these may have been for reasons more spurious than having a laugh. But media organisations should not presume that just because a group of hackers delivers their news right to a journalists’ deskstop via a Twitter feed, that noone else has been at it the whole time.

What’s clear is that the textbook on how to get the media interested – indeed how to string them along – has been rewritten.

Recent attacks on Sega as well as the UK’s Office for National Statistics were denied by the group.  Could someone else be leaking data just for the lulz? Probably.

So watch out for LulzSec Brazil, watch out for LulzSec Italy. Watch out for all sorts of groups who wouldn’t mind some mainstream media notoriety.

Because until someone gets sentenced for some very audacious attacks, you can expect more of the same.