This is kinda what trump wants. If the government cant handle "online stuff" they can pitch privatization. It hurts more if tech megacorps get hacked. Though at this point I wou'd laugh if a bunch of internet nerds got the nuclear codes or locked up a bunch of satellites
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Imagine if one nuclear head was pointed to every megacorp headquarters in the US.
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Tomorrow
Trump: By executive order, I dismantle the computer warfare and defence division
Musk: It doesn't exist anymore!
The day after
Anonymous: They turned off their service that sanitized all inputs. We just stole everything from every department, and put cats on every governments webpage.
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By all means do. It's not like much of value is lost at this point.
It'll take 40 years to fix the damage he'll do in 4.
I don't think 4 years of accelerated climate damage is gonna be fixed in 40 years...
That assumes that we have a party interested in fixing anything.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho will be interested.
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Ah, Anonymous—the digital equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. Trump’s America? Weakness isn’t new—it’s baked into the propaganda circus we’ve called democracy since Reagan. You think script kiddies and Elon’s crypto-bros “hacking fascism” will fix anything? Please. The real op is watching tech oligarchs and politicians collude while we argue about which flavor of dystopia we’re slurping.
Infrastructure attacks? Bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it works out when grandma’s dialysis machine gets bricked by some edgelord’s Python script. If you want revolution, stop fetishizing IRC nostalgia and touch grass. Until then, this is just digital graffiti on a burning trash barge.
I'm not going to write off hacktivism so quickly.
Even if it's just a few defaced websites now and then, that's a whole lot more effective than any other sort of activism I've seen to date.
Even a god king bleeds
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Anything supposedly said by "Anonymous" as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate "outlets" for their statements... but there's also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit "anon news outlets" and little script kiddies running around. It's important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more "serious" factions.
Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you're in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.
No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It's been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there's the fact that more than one of them have "serious black hat hacker" backgrounds.
Going to be one wild ride.
little script kiddies running around
Yeah, they're running around the Treasury Dept right now.
It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security
Having worked with government agencies and a lot of large private organizations the thing that keeps them mostly secure is the amount of red tape involved with things. Patching a production system requires a teleconference with at least five different people and no one person knows everything.
The idiots without any security experience coming in to "streamline" things will just make the systems even more fragile and insecure.
Known and vetted systems are always the most secure. Until RSA is broken, and then they'll need to update to a quantum resilient standard. Which we've had in the wild for 6 years already and the NIST has officially approved for 2 years.
We're still at least a decade away from a machine with enough qbits to do it. So i feel like we should be fine.
It's the fucking Credit Bureaus, Telecoms, and Energy Companies I worry about. They keep fucking up.
Anyone who complies with the NIST standards is in a good place.
The problem is that a lot of places are not in compliance with NIST standards.
I know, I've helped patch them.
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Yeah. I've only spent a few moments skimming through the linked article but if you were part of a legitimate hacktivism group planning a significant operation why would you publish this statement ?
It's really just spooky hyperbole - as though written by an adolescent that want's to sound scary and powerful.
I would absolutely love to see hacktivists cause some chaos, and maybe even some real financial harm.
The whole point is to being attention to the rise of fascism. Hacking without releasing a statement like this is just terrorism. Releasing a statement after hacking can make it easier for the govt to cover up, like "no we weren't hacked, someone in our server room just accidentally tripped over a power cable"
I don't know about government overall, but the military and HHS have has some of the most stringent security stances I've encountered. To the point where just working for them was a massive chore. (How effective they were I guess I don't know, but working for them sucked.)
That said, I'll take what you said on faith, because I think you're spot on with everything else.
Often, ridiculous and onerous procedural security is hiding massively incompetent actual software security or is used to constrain people from discovering security by obscurity holes. Everything I've done in government interfacing as a vendor would seem to confirm this, at least back when I was doing it a few years ago. You'd be hard pressed to convince me it's changed much since.
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hack the planet
Exploit it you say? Please get in line behind the russians, the chinese snd pretty much all arab countries
What did we do? As if our governments aren’t US vassals? Yet you still demonize us. If Arab governments had any sway our governments wouldn’t be paying tributes and forced to normalize with Israel and host US troops.
The only foreign country that controls US politics and bought US politicians from both major parties is Israel. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt have been caught spying on the US (or US citizens) from what I know
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt have been caught spying on the US (or US citizens) from what I know
Dude, America has spied on even its allies. The bar is pretty low, here.
Saudi Arabia is allegedly spying on Saudis abroad including in the US. Specifically government critics on social media. Saudi Arabia allegedly spied on its citizens in the US through a network flaw
This is bad and probably violates US laws. But it wasn’t targeting the US or US citizens. Meanwhile, Israel is targeting the US and US citizens: Israel Has Long Spied on U.S., Say Officials
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As much and as little that anonymous means, because of the name, because of what the name implies, because of what they do, claim they do, and well, we don't know what they do... As much as all of that is true, it's AWESOME to hear from them again, if it is them...
I can't wait to see "real" anonymous actions again, lord knows we can use it
Genuine question, was it ever anything more than a bunch of 4chaners and script kiddies?
Lol what even is a "real Anonymous"
Its like "Antifa", its not an organization, its an idea.
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Will it be like when they launched a load of DDoS attacks against Sony, of which the only impact was annoying regular people and doing nothing to the company they were supposedly going after?
They have always been techno-punks: anti-establishment and more style than substance. That being said, if nothing else, they were able to shine a light on shitty people and that's more than most folks do.
I wish they were getting into organizations and dumping gigs of documents detailing illegal and anti-consumer/citizen activities, but money and law enforcement really goes after anything with an actually impact that might affect wealth. No one actually gives a shit about a website being down. (Excepting like... Amazon or Google and good fucking luck with that.)
So it's like a flaming bag of shit left on a porch. They take care of it and shout "you damn punks!" But if you burn the barn down, every cop in the county will be interrogating everyone they can find until you are caught.
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Oh wow. They'll shut down a website for a day.
Whoop-tee-doo.
Well I hope they choose their targets right, otherwise it'll just make everything worse.
That's kind of inevitable right now. The most important thing is making sure Trump and the GOP get the blame. Well, them or Russia.
Actually, the best targets aren't the government. It's big business.
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Hit the Government of Putin where it hurts.
Don't need to open Twitter to watch it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI27LEimfYg
I'm also remembering an IT crowd scene where they argue about which of them is in Anonymous, and I can't find it now. Does anyone have a link handy? Unless I am misremembering
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