At least for the time being, Stuxnet is a form of asymmetric warfare. But Operation Payback is not so. Here the battle lines are clearly drawn and both sides use almost same weapons to counter each other.
Probably for the first time in history of the war between the Rulers and the Ruled ones, the latter uses the same weapon as the former in an otherwise asymmetric war for centuries.
Operation Payback is the cyber attacks undertaken by a group of Anonymous Hactivists against the websites of Govt. of Sweden, Paypal, Visa and Amazon. They even attacked the websites of certain US Senators.
What is special and ideological in some group of hackers attacking certain money spinning websites like Paypal, Amazon and Visa? In fact is this what the hackers always do as a routine?
The difference between normal hackings and Op- Payback is that the attacks are not aimed at data theft or financial profits. Before that we will see the cause and modus operandi of Op Payback.
When a non-commercial website named www.wikileaks.org spilled some beans about certain high places, initially no one even gave a glance. Things changed when the whistle blowing website revealed some documents on the Church of Scientology. Web-world slowly showed some respect towards the site and soon recognized as a prime whistle-blowing website.
It was the Afghan and Iraq War Logs of the US Army that made wikileaks as the centre point of global attention. The treasure of information revealed the appalling state of affairs of the war-ravaged Afghan and Iraq. Particularly the revelations that there were exponentially high civilian casualties inflicted by US and its coalition partners in Iraq and Afghan made the superpowers worried and they decided to neutralize the wiki-threat.
Wikileaks also took the battle call seriously and its next step is much daring. It informed that it will release the diplomatic cables sent by various US embassies all around the earth in nearly four decades. The US instead of heeding to a redacting call of the documents by wikileaks, stepped to stop the leaks.
The breath-taking events occurred then were now history. Wikileaks slowly released diplomatic cables and named it as Cablegate. US, which is well known for its strong-arm tactics just like any other modern democracy retaliated by unleashing the massive DDoS attack the world has ever seen. For almost two days the data of wikileaks could not be accessed. Not satisfied with the DDoS, the US went further by “advising” Amazon to drop Wikileaks from its server. Amazon heeded the call along with EveryDNS dutifully.
The Domain Name Server company and the Cloud Computing company carrying the data of Wikileaks were cowed down by advice or threat whatever you call. So the data will not emerge. What’s next? US officials brainstormed and decided to cut-off the money supply to Wikileaks. As wikileaks is a non-commercial entity, it is survived by money and efforts of volunteers. US struck there by advising and Paypal and Visa to drop wikileaks.
Now funding is cut off. And getting orphaned in cyber space by losing the cloud space and domain name servers. So far it is an asymmetric warfare in cyber space by US.
Wikileaks took the bull by the horns.
It resurfaced from another set of servers in Europe with around thirty mirror sites. To make things worse it has floated in cyber space a Thermonuclear Device named insurance.aes256. The 1.3 GB file, allegedly contains all the documents of Cable Gate with other financial scandals and was downloaded immediately by around 10,000 net users around the globe. So Master Weapon deployed. It is believed that if wikileaks is to be taken down by the affected governments, this file will act as an insurance and reveal the truths to the world which every government is dying hard to hide especially US.
Almost lost in the cyber war, which is getting even by the actions of wikileaks, a rape case was registered against the founder of wikileaks. But this is not a very novel technique to arrest somebody you don’t like. But this is yet practiced in every democracy. In certain democracies, we put narco-drugs in the house of the person we don’t like and we will arrest him. Then we will kill him in encounter saying that he was trying to escape and in the process, he tried to kill the policemen. In self defence, the police shot back and the accused died due to gun shot wounds.
Anticipating arrest, the founder sneaked into London and got arrested there. Precisely, this is the time, the dimension of the war was completely changed. So far it is between Wikileaks Vs Western Democracies. Now started Op Payback. A group of anonymous hacker-activists paid back to US in its own coin. A massive DDoS attack was unleashed on the websites of certain US Senators, Paypal, Visa, Amazon and Government of Sweden.
In one way, it can be seen as the manifestation of the inner aversion of global citizens towards their governments which will not tolerate expression of citizens in whatever form, that are adverse to its interests.
So Operation Payback is a brief Cyber War waged by the citizens against their own governments in support of a just cause, with the same weapons used by the governments themselves.
It is high time, governments shall change the way they are running their diplomacy by making it more transparent. It is important for governments to respect the Right of Expression of its people. Or else……Op Payback 2.0 may happen
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