HACKERS TAKE AIM AT RNC

Protesters have been tar­get­ing gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate web­sites for years. But when online activists strike at Republican domains dur­ing the G.O.P.‘s con­ven­tion later this month, the dig­i­tal demon­stra­tions might turn out to be more than sym­bolic, for once.
In the past, activists have been able to shut down the web­site of, say, the World Economic Forum for a few hours. But the impact of such a take­down was neb­u­lous at best: It’s hard to argue the orga­ni­za­tion really suf­fered from a few-​​hour lag in post­ing its press releases online.
In this year’s pres­i­den­tial race, how­ever, cam­paign web­sites have moved beyond the mar­gins. During John Kerry’s accep­tance speech in Boston last month, for exam­ple, his web­site was vis­ited by 50,000 peo­ple an hour, accord­ing to ComScore Networks, the online traffic-​​measuring firm. That’s a droplet com­pared to the mil­lions who’ll watch the con­ven­tion on TV. But tak­ing down a cam­paign web­site would nev­er­the­less remove a crit­i­cal tool for reach­ing the pub­lic — and likely gen­er­ate a slew of sto­ries in the main­stream media about the crash.
So it’s no sur­prise that hard­ened elec­tronic activists are plan­ning to jam up the servers of georgew​bush​.com, rnc​.org, and related web­sites, once the Republican National Convention gets under­way on August 29.
“We want to bom­bard (the Republican sites) with so much traf­fic that nobody can get in,” said CrimethInc, a mem­ber of the so-​​called Black Hat Hackers Bloc.
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: Salon’s Michelle Goldberg has a super story today on how rad­i­cal pro­test­ers’ tac­tics could back­fire — and cost John Kerry the elec­tion.
AND MORE: Steve Gilliard says Michelle is full of it.

Goldberg is wor­ried about a bunch of halfwits who the cops have loudly announced that they are watch­ing.
The prob­lem with the Chicago anal­ogy is mul­ti­ple, but let’s start with the police riot and end with the dis­or­der in the hall. The anar­chists are kids who will quickly learn that if the NYPD can han­dle St. Patrick’s Day and the Puerto Rican Day parade where every­one over the age of 16 is drunk, their lit­tle street the­ater will pose no chal­lenge.
But I think she needs to harp on the anarcho-​​kiddies. Get the GOP nice and fright­ened of them, wor­ried about their antics.
Why?
Because the real protests, the ones that get peo­ple, includ­ing cops and fire­men into the streets will be far dif­fer­ent affairs. I don’t get why she is so obsessed with some loud talk­ing white boys from Williamsburg, who have nei­ther influ­ence nor sup­port, while ignor­ing the far more seri­ous protests on tap. If I was Rove, I would worry about the big union protests, not the anarcho-​​antics.

AND MORE: In my arti­cle today, I make ref­er­ence to a recent hacker con­fer­ence ses­sion promis­ing to teach folks how “to infil­trate orga­ni­za­tions like the RNC.” Defense Tech reader CL says that was wrong. “The HOPE con­fer­ence that you referred to in your arti­cle does not endorse morons such as these ‘Black Hat Hackers.’ It is, in fact, peo­ple like them who give hack­ers a bad name. It’s offen­sive that you refer to that gath­er­ing in such a detri­men­tal way only to per­pet­u­ate the hys­te­ria that comes with the word ‘hacker.’”

August 17th, 2004 | Dissent Tech | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.