Monday, November 5, 2012

Guy Fawkes day hackathon

Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the early years of the 17th Century.  His "Gunpowder Plot" was exposed, and he and his co-conspirators were executed in various unpleasant ways.  November 5 has been for years and years an excuse for a jolly good celebration in the UK, with bonfires, fireworks, alcohol, and burning effigies of the Pope.

Good times, good times.

The Guy (as he's known) has become something of an icon to the hacktivist crowd, particularly the loose coalition that likes to call themselves Anonymous.  Today, Anonymous has been on a rampage:
Anonymous claims to have leaked 28,000 passwords from PayPal as part of a a global day of protest to mark 5 November, Guy Fawkes night.

Hacktivists uploaded thousands of email addresses, names, and passwords - supposedly snaffled from the payment processing firms systems, TheNextWeb reports. A PayPal representative said it has yet to find any evidence of a security breach, but is nonetheless investigating the claim.

‪#OpNov5‬ also featured purported hacks against a server at ImageShack and a Symantec portal, thehackernews.com reports. The Symantec hack allegedly resulted in the leak of email addresses and other personal data from hundreds of security researchers. Hackers claimed to have exploited a zero-day bug in the ZPanel portal software used by Symantec to pull off the hack.

...

The Register reported earlier today that several NBC websites including its mobile site were defaced with the message "Remember, remember the fifth of November" (extracts from a nursery rhyme about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder plot to blow up the UK Parliament in 1605).

However, other elements of Anonymous have distanced themselves from the NBC "prank" attack as well as from supposed plans to take down Facebook and free Zynga games later today, which always seemed unlikely. As Sophos notes, self-identifying elements of Anonymous made threats to attack Facebook last year on 5 November without anything ultimately occurring.
Rather a busy day, all in all.  No word as to whether The Lads had time for a pint or ten and a jolly fun burning of the Pontif's effigy.

5 comments:

Home on the Range said...

I was in London in my late teens on an internship thing and remember the kids begging pennies for the guy. Been a while since I was in the UK during October, but imagine they still do it.

Old NFO said...

Just another reason to limit your online 'presence' to things you can control!

Anonymous said...

Anonymous have been infiltrated heavily by the eff bee eye a lot of what you see now is driven by those guys as agent provocateurs. A lot of the actual anonymous founders have dropped out because of this.
So this is your tax dollars at work.

Anonymous said...

Borepatch since when do we burn the pontiffs effigy the effigy burnt is that of Guy Fawkes himself. After being paraded around town to raise money for fireworks except maybe in Ulster.
The Gunpowder plotters were trying to kill the duly elected members of Parliament so they could by decapitating the protestant leadership establish a catholic absolute monarchy. Lucky for you it failed or there would have been no American revolution.

Broken Andy said...

What exactly is their point? Ok, their activists. But for what?