"You cannot arrest an idea."
The only tweet found on the twitter feed of 19 turning 20 year-old Jake Davis (@atopiary). He has allegedly been involved in attacks or hacks against: Sony, The Sun, EA Games, SOCA (Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency), CIA, EVE Online, Fox TV, Twitter & Linkedln.
Hacking is a process by which a programmer or a team of programmers design a piece of software which can bypass encryptions and gain unauthorised access to data. The problem is no matter how much is spent on security to try stopping these hackers, for some reason they still seem to break the barrier and bypass the security.
Hacking crimes are estimated to cost United States corporations alone $63 billion a year, and then $75.6 billion in the following year, now that isn’t a small amount of money. The U.S defence network is attacked around 250,000 times a year, with only one in 500 of these attacks detected. When Hollywood came to release their next generation DVD formats such as Blu-ray, they had spent billions on this ‘hugely complex and expensive beast’ called Advanced Access Content System (AACS); designed to prevent unauthorised pirating. They thought they had the solution which actually took the hacker “Arnezami” a few weeks to bypass this beast. “It’s pretty incredible that a carefully thought-of encryption system is now reduced to, at worst, a guessing game. Somebody should feel very ashamed.” Arnezami wrote once he had bypassed the system. If after all that money is spent and hackers are still succeeding, I can definitely relate to why this money can be seen as wasted.
On 7th April a famous hacker group 'Anonymous' launched a campaign called "#OpIsrael". They planned to attack Israeli websites, facebook, twitter, bank, & email accounts. This wasn't the first of this type of attack. The group consists of smaller hacker groups worldwide who come together on such events and aim all their efforts onto one target.
this image is a tweet is from the AVG(popular security/anti-virus software) for Israel twitter handle. According to this blog by an Anonymous member partial damage from attack cost $3+ billion. Also they posted a list of the damage caused and websites effected:
Anonymous partial damage report: - 100k+ websites - 40k Facebook pages - 5k twitter - 30k Israeli bank acc got hacked - Israelien prime ministers wife number: 0502977997 … Lulz - 3k+ websites of companies in israeli cyber space completely deleted - Secret Israel Documents of Military leaked - Several Gov websites hacked like Central Bureau of Statistics, Government Companies Authority, Government Publications Office, The National Insurance Institute, Israel’s Social Security ogranization, Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel Export Institute, Israel Government Press Office, Israel Ministry of Defense, Israel Ministry of Environment, Israel Ports & Railways Authority, Israeli Antiquity Authority, Israeli Judicial Authority, Israeli Prime Minister, Parlament’s website, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, Culture And Sports, State of Israel Information Technologies, Offical website of the State of Israel, Citizen Info Service, The Civil Service Commission, The Jewish Agency, Ministry of Tourism etc. - Several trading websites hacked and US supported Zionist exposed - 200k+ Visa/Mastercards users leaked on the internet
Questions that come to mind are: Was it that easy? Can they do it again if they wanted to? does it really matter? more importantly can you even stop them?
Maybe Jake Davis had a valid point "You cannot arrest an idea."
