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Captain America
12-16-2010, 12:29 PM
(They also link and mirror wikileaks)


HACKER MAGAZINE CONDEMNS DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACKS

New York, NY, December 10, 2010 - 2600 Magazine, a quarterly journal for the hacker community that has published since 1984, is speaking out against numerous media reports that hackers are responsible for a spate of attacks on numerous e-commerce corporations as part of the ongoing Wikileaks controversy.

Denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other corporations and entities have been underway for the last few days, as widely reported in the mainstream media. Each of these targets had previously taken some sort of action against the whistleblower website wikileaks.org and its affiliates. The media reports almost invariably refer to "hackers" as being behind these actions. While there is great sympathy in the hacker world for what Wikileaks is doing, this type of activity is no better than the strong-arm tactics we are fighting against.

These attacks, in addition to being a misguided effort that doesn't accomplish very much at all, are incredibly simple to launch and require no technical or hacker skills. While writing such programs requires a good degree of ingenuity and knowledge of security weaknesses, this doesn't mean that everyone who runs them possesses the same degree of proficiency, nor should we necessarily believe people who claim to be doing this on behalf of the hacker community.

continued at http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037

AxisMundi
12-16-2010, 12:49 PM
Nice to have people in the field vindicate my position, even if the reasoning doesn't match perfectly.

dannno
12-16-2010, 12:57 PM
lol, amazing that publication is still around.. I haven't heard the name 2600 in about 10 years, but as soon as I read "2600" in the thread title I immediately thought back to the hacker mag..

Captain America
12-17-2010, 12:26 PM
I use to read the magazine. They are hackers. Hackers are mis-characterized as always being malicious.

AxisMundi
12-17-2010, 04:37 PM
I use to read the magazine. They are hackers. Hackers are mis-characterized as always being malicious.

Indeed.

If memory serves, hackers once meant anyone who wrote programs from scratch.

There was another term for the malicious type who broke into systems and/or crafted harmful viruses.

danda
12-17-2010, 04:49 PM
hackers != crackers.

AxisMundi
12-17-2010, 05:22 PM
hackers != crackers.

Thank you, couldn't remember the term.

Inflation
12-17-2010, 11:28 PM
They're just being snobby uber-31337ists because LOIC requires very little skill to use. And it might help them sell more dead-tree copies of their tired old rag.

"omg, 'how to hack a coin-op air compressor?!?' i better buy this issue right away"

I'll wait for Phrack or CDC to tell me what to think about Operation Payback.

*waits*