Nobody would have believed…

“No-one would have believed, in the last days of 2010, that these were the first days of the first internet war…”

And in return, there are reports that “Anonymous’ own Web site, anonops.net, has been hit with massive counter-DDOS attacks”.

Context: WikiLeaks: Who are the hackers behind Operation Payback?

And the result?

PS a bit more context – best not forget that last week saw netizens finding ways of routing round censorship/damage when Wikileaks’ DNS registration was taken down (e.g. WikiLeaks: A Case Study in Web Survivability).

And more: WikiLeaks Gets Its Own “Axis of Evil” Defense Network: “after sending out a plea for ways to keep the site up and running following the removal of DNS services by its provider EveryDNS, the organization now has over 1,200 mirror sites set up — many of them in Europe — through which it can publish any documents instantly. The site has also taken a number of other steps that will make it virtually impossible to remove it completely from the Internet .”

And on the Anon folk: The 24-hour Athenian democracy [The Economist]

23.44 Seems like the Anon folk have having to flit around the twitterverse:

Who knows wtf is going on? Fog of (dis)information descends:

Readwriteweb is also reporting that the Anon folks are claiming their Facebook Group page has been taken down… (anyone got before and after screenshots?)

A quick poke around US threat level documentations turns up the INFOCON threat scale [pdf] (Wikipedia quick hit) which gets me wondering: do corps like Facebook and Twitter have INFOCON levels of their own, and did they just up them..?!;-)

Thurs, 00.09 I think Twitter oopsed…

…though from (dis)information flying around, this might just be that loads of folk are tuning in to Twitter to find out what’s going on, and this might just be a “normal” heavy load handling issue… My Tweetdeck app is having slow moments, but generally updating atm…

And something else to bear in mind is that Twitter is the mass comms channel for the cheerers on who aren’t plugged in to IRC…

Thinkses: Given that the rapid creation and suspension of accounts on services like Twitter is a possibility, do we need something like a spread spectrum client that can hop between trusted status updating accounts, and route round accounts that get suspended?

00.24 It seems that no-one knows wtf is going on?!

Confusion?

00.38 boing…

PS Just remember: This is not a game… … Err… And also: in the UK at least, knowing taking part in a structured DDOS attack is illegal (Sophos: Are DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the law?, Police and Justice Bill and its Impact on Denial of Service attacks).