Meursault posted:There was that thing in like 2010 where they had a huge password-protected Bank of America file, but I guess nothing came from that
wasn't that wikileaks? nothing ever came of it either way
anyway it bears remembering that anonymous started out of 4chan protests against scientology, their symbol is a trademark of warner bros, and the only skill theyve consistently demonstrated is DDoSing stuff like the playstation network. lol
aint
hacked
shit
Anonymity also aids efforts to wreck and disrupt leftist circles, just look at social media for examples of this.
We (the public) have no idea what the algorithm used to encrypt is, since its not an open source formula, and thus have no ability to confirm it's security. we should assume these tools are broken because it is in the US Gov's best interest for them to be, and because so many other techbros and self-proclaimed hacker radicals in the bay have worked on or around the project.
Edited by JohnBeige ()
xipe posted:But all of the platforms ie android and apple phones themselves are compromised and so every app that runs on them is compromised too
This. End to end encryption doesn't get you anything if the platform reports home first, ignoring the password speedbump
spectralmarx posted:there's a general unevenness in how popular discourse ascribes power to hackers.
yeah, it's called mythology. some of it's entirely false, i.e. russian hackers hacked the election - no, someone phished the DNC a couple of times and leaked some documents, big deal. but mostly it's just hyperbole around the technologies and access involved. the ATM malware is pretty rare and usually needs to be installed through direct physical access, so it's not much worse than skimmers. paypal was just a DDoS, not a hack - just a bunch of people hammering the service with requests so it got overloaded and didn't work for a moment. ashley madison was a simple website hack using SQL injection, that kind of thing is mostly automated and relies on poor web design and lax security. isis guys using this or that software has nothing to do with hacking.
so what would give you the impression big banks can be "hacked", and what do you mean by that? money stolen? not going to happen outside of individual accounts getting drained by scammers or skimmers or whatever. or do you mean getting information from them? well anything's possible but bank security is good enough that what you can get from phishing employees (a la DNC hacks) is going to be limited if it works at all, and bank websites are pretty secure and in any case separate from systems with non-public info, so hacking them is pointless. you'd pretty much have to get physical access somehow and i can't see a spotty teen in a guy fawkes mask managing that.
the abilities of the state are orders of magnitude greater not because they have magic powers but because they have the labour, the resources, and most importantly the access (physical and otherwise) to do extraordinary things. so if they want to read someone's telegram messages or whatever, they just need to work out which phone belongs to that person, and use unpublished exploits to own it and read messages in the clear once the app has decoded them. it's not that difficult when you have the money to buy exploits off the grey market and backchannels into apple & google servers, and you know there is zero chance of being prosecuted. the only limit to this is they obviously can't just watch everyone's communications all the time, it has to be targeted, and there's a whole bureaucratic apparatus involved too of course
Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia ()
tears posted:rename this thread "Weed hypothesis about anonymous"
Tor received 6.1 million from a cia front
pogfan1996 posted:It's a good thing to remember that basically all the "security culture" programs that advertise anonymity (tor, signal, etc) receive up to 85% of their funding from us government front groups. Anonymous lone wolf/small groups don't present a challenge to the power structure, people embedded in organized communities do. There are several paths of least resistance set up to redirect energy into controllable forms of organization, an anonymized individual can be excised from a community with no resistance.
Anonymity also aids efforts to wreck and disrupt leftist circles, just look at social media for examples of this.
Yasha Levine when writing about this notes as an aside what i think is really one of his strongest points, which is that the mobile services can't anonymize either end point given how they're installed on machines completely managed by companies that give up full personal data to any agency upon request, and so the easiest thing in the world for security agencies to do is to keep a list of the people who install the app and flag them for monitoring through every other channel. You're signing your name as someone worthwhile to tap in order to disrupt actions through information sharing between law enforcement agencies.
Edited by JohnBeige ()
