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February 16th, 2012, 14:29 GMT · By

Anonymous Wants Internet Blackout, Targets 13 "Root" DNS Servers

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Anonymous wants to take down the Internet
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A Pastebin post, allegedly published a few days ago by members of Anonymous, reveals the hacktivists’ intentions to shut down the Internet on March 31 by going after “the 13 root DNS servers of the Internet.”

While many may argue that this is a hard to accomplish task, it seems as the plan is already laid out. A number of 13 IP addresses are listed, which allegedly belong to the 13 DNS servers.

The initiators of this attack, part of Operation Global Blackout, are aware of the fact that the Internet can’t be simply unplugged, but they’re confident that the sites to suffer as a result of this outage will draw enough attention to their cause.

“By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web,” the hackers write.

“Anybody entering ‘http://www.google.com’ or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to 'kill' the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.”

The mastermind behind this operation claims he already compiled a Reflective DNS Amplification DDOS tool to be used in this attack.

“It is called an amplified because we can use small packets to generate large traffic. It is called reflective because we will not send the queries to the root name servers, instead, we will use a list of known vulnerable DNS servers which will attack the root servers for us.”

We have contacted some security experts hoping that they can provide some technical insight on this plan of action. Stay tuned to see if professionals find these claims plausible.
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Anonymous
DNS
DDOS


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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: an on 16 Feb 2012, 17:58 UTC reply to this comment

YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED US


Comment #2 by: scott on 16 Feb 2012, 21:18 UTC reply to this comment

Going from what is in this article, we have nothing with which to assess the threat -- if it is real or a gag, if it has any potential for success, or what goals it might serve. Someone posted to pastebin, claiming to be related to Anonymous, claiming to have specialized tools, and claiming to have the means (ie numbers of co-conspirators) to do the job -- all of which means absolutely nothing without corroboration. Either Anonymous is really moving and is successfully using anonymity to do the job, or you are reporting piffle and rumor. If you have corroboration, or some reason to give this miscellaneous internet posting some weight, please share it. Until then, I will put this article in the "FUD to make us scared" category.

Comment #2.1 by: Eduard K on 17 Feb 2012, 14:57 GMT

Thanks for the feedback. Please check out the second part of this article in which security experts debate if the attack is plausible or not.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Experts-Anonymous-Attacks-on-Root-DNS-Servers-Not-Plausible-253506.shtml


Comment #3 by: Pappa Dragon on 28 Mar 2012, 09:41 UTC reply to this comment

I think this could be a laugh to all those Internet dependant felines out there who are incapable of living without it.

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