At least some MasterCard payment processing vendors have reported that in addition to the mastercard website being offline, a loss of service of MasterCard SecureCode.

yay! This sounds like it is going to be fun! [/sarcasm]

I was reading an article that called Anonymous an "activist" group. I guess that's the politically-correct term for trolling.

haha, but Anonymous saved a kitty D:

trolls eat kitties not save them D:

This is a fact. Where would you like us to go with this thread? Are you interested in whether people support or object to WikiLeaks etc? I think few people would say that Anonymous was right to attack Mastercard, even if they feel that payment processors like Paypal and Mastercard are wrong to bow to government pressure.

It's really a form of civil disobedience made painless. Gandhi's followers were battered down (without resistance) by the hundreds when they walked into that salt mine. Most Anon are relying on anonymity and safety in numbers to protect them from repercussions.



I'm really just curious as to people's reactions. I don't think Anon are in the right, but neither are our government, or anyone else in this whole debacle. Disabling (even temporarily) Mastercard payments has the potential to cause economic disruption, compared to their other stunts protesting Scientology, or animal abuse. And there is also the anti-"moralf@g" contingent who see Anon as a force for chaos, independent of moral alignment (unlike the one interviewed in the article above, who seems himself as a force for chaotic good).

Anon is a very interesting beast, and I have to side with them on this issue. I found out this morning at school while browsing the news for AP Gov, and sure enough, Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal were all down. I think that what the government is doing is completely wrong, and that they really have this coming to them. I don't expect a full out sh*t storm or anything, but several websites and other groups will get what is coming to them.

Courtney says MasterCard processing has been funky for her at work today, but she isn't sure what the problem is.

Let's hope Anon doesn't get mad at Cemetech, or Kerm will have a massive headache.

Oh dear, lets not even go there x.x

In all honesty, I think there's enough know-how here between Kerm, Kllrnoj, and others, to eventually repel and reverse an anonymous attack should the worst come to pass. However, I think we are currently ill-prepared for a first strike, and the mods are gonna have a lot of cleanup on their hands afterward should we get attacked.

As for Anon's actions here, more power to them I say. Yes it's causing economic problems, that's the whole point. The government takes an action that is offensive to internet users everywhere, and the internet collectively f@#$s them in the anus.

If the technicians at one of the largest DDoS protection services in the world have trouble fending off Anon, I don't think we stand a chance.

That's why I said we're ill-prepared for the first wave. However, I think after a while people could get a system in place to fend off the attack if worst comes to worst.

Maybe if I was an admin....

The problem with DDoS is that it's really really hard to impossible to actually stop. You basically have to have more bandwidth than the combined bandwidth of everyone attacking you.

I'm sure there's ways you can redirect the connections right back at them, slowing down each individual machine to a crawl, isn't there?

Yeah, but only at the cost of using your own bandwidth to do so; multiply by number of attackers. Of course, say one of your gmods worked for Google, and was unethical enough to use their nearly infinite power for the sake of good... I kid, of course.

The key to stop a DDOS attack is to have more bandwidth but also to have multiple servers with different ip addresses. The reason you want multiple servers is so that when one runs out of bandwidth you switch it to another and they have to stop targeting that ip address and try to take out the new one. If you had enough servers it could turn into a cat & mouse game and the websites downtime would depend on how fast you can change the websites ip address. Another alternative would be to block an ip address after it uses "x" amount of data within a certain amount of time.

Wow.. super necropost, eh? Try not to reply to old posts!

To add to the discussion, I'm pretty divided on the issue. "Anonymous" is a big bunch of cowards who think that their use of an open source stress testing program will change things. (I'm not going to tell you the program name, but if you google carefully, you'll find it.) Julian? He's an a-hole himself - more or less a troll in real life. I doubt he really does it for "freedom of info" - more for being famous and as usual, fun for being a troll. And the government? It's wrong to go haywire and start censoring like heck, and for hiding that many things in the first place.

In the end.... everyone's a dumdum, and I'd rather see this ended more than ever.

but the thing is, why would we have a DDos attack anyways? We have no beef with Anon, and vice-versa. In fact, perhaps talking about them hypothetically DDoSing us in this public topic makes Anon WANT to DDoS us

I agree if the government hadn't made a big deal about this and people started running their mouths it would have been over in one week.