At 8pm EST, Anonymous began a planned DDoS attack against the US Chamber of Commerce's commercial website at uschamber.com. the site went down instatly, but was saved by a DDoS protection firm called DoSArrest. Anonymous members discontinued their attack within the hour and tested their secondary targets with varying degrees of success until it was decided by some and spread to the many that tactics should be changed. As of 8:30pm, most Anonymous members had stopped their attacks, citing the lack of marginal effect (beyond the $5,000/hour bill for DoSarrest), and were locating email addresses to hijack, and others to spam from the hijacked addresses. This piratepad was used to communicate which emails to target.
Hackers in the group, meanwhile, announced their intentions to locate "exploits," anything in uschamber.com's SQL that would allow them to take control of the website. SQL has a history of criticism for being insecure. Eventually, a user identified as "Kayla" was able to insert coding of her own design into the website of Ireland's Chamber of Commerce and give away all of the website's administrator passwords. She declared them "first come first serve" and was immediately hailed by the 300 other people in the irc chatroom being used as "a Goddess," and then, a half-hour later, questioned about the target. In private chats, several Anonymous users told the examiner.com that it was unclear why Ireland was targeted.
One member had this to say: 'Kayla is a script kiddie. She's good, but not a pro. There is still work being done in the hidden channels and the private channels for the deface of the US chamber of commerce website. We cannot control the mass. They go in their own direction and do not have the technical ability to take the operation any further. Without guidance, they go their own path.'
Another anon separately added: 'I'm not sure to be honest. I think they just fond vulnerabilities and are going for lulz.' Lulz is a word found only in internet dictionaries of ill-repute.
More users, in private interviews, claimed that uschamber.com was never a possible target to take down, claiming that the typical transfer rate of their server would have required that over 5,000,000 bots participate in the attack in order to 'clog the tube,' as Ted Stevens would say.
Simultaneous to that conversation, a fourth Anon told examienr.com the following: '#operationpayback [the operation's chatroom] is the mass. The real force of the attack comes from our botnet controllers. Each of these controllers can control up to 5000 bots at a time. The largest botnet controller I have conversed with from anonymous had around 3500 bots, with a majority of them being shells on servers with a much greater capacity for attack because of their higher processing power and considerably higher bandwidth.'
'Lastly,' he added, 'the botnet controllers work in their own groups away from the mass. They are referred to as scary channels. It's the same kind of people in scary channels as the mass, just with a greater technical knowledge. The scary channels are more civilised. More focused.''
Anonymous had invited 4chan.org users, notorious for a lack of civility, intelligence, and highschool diplomas, to join in the raid. This begged the question to the most forthcoming interviewee, 'why was 4chan invited?' the fourth Anon interviewed answered: '4chan is a powerful tool because they are like sheep, they know how to use our cannons [LOIC] and our hives [a function of LOIC] and they have a large following.'
As of 11:30PM EST, uschamber.com was doing fine, meaning that the attack was not yet successful. The examiner will continue to update as the situation unfolds.
