The Dark Side Of Facebook, Where People Lie, Steal, And Make Millions

 

Business Insider - On Feb. 10, Jason Fyk received a strange Facebook message.

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they're young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others' sites.

Facebook - Fyk said he received this Facebook wall post right as his site was crashing.

Anthony prefers the name the Community, and he readily admits — albeit communicating only under a pseudonym — that the group’s activities include hijacking valuable Facebook pages for fun and viral fame. (Meanwhile, Anthony and his cohorts refer to the WTF team as the Neckbeards.)

 

One of Fyk’s employees quickly determined that FunnierPics.net was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) reflection attack. When Fyk’s team contacted the host, GoDaddy, they learned an estimated 70,000 servers had gone dead, resulting in more than 1 million customers losing web service. Fyk’s IP address, GoDaddy confirmed, was the attackers’ target. The others were collateral damage.   Read More

The Future is Now – The Dark Side and Hacktivism

TechNewsWorld - Understand that the Dark Side is greatly motivated by social and political interests that are difficult to predict and not necessarily useful in forming strategic or tactical defense plans. This understanding will help organizations craft strategic decisions about layered protections in all verticals exposed to the Internet.

We live in times when technology is exceeding the understanding of educational institutions and corporations. A highly social Web and a bad economy is making the Dark Side — the Internet underworld where cybercrime and hacking run rampant — overwhelming.

Hacktivism is the new, hip thing; it has become a hobby for people with higher-than-average computer knowledge. The movement is led by an elite few who have a deep, lifelong knowledge of computers, and it includes senior Fortune 100 corporate executives and highly placed governmental employees, as well as the ranks of the unemployed.

The elite world of hacktivism is at the center of the Internet’s Dark Side. While governmental agencies are looking for the individuals responsible for various acts of hacktivism, they struggle with using their tried-and-true methods to move up the food chain to identify hacktivist leaders.

What is not well understood is that these layers cannot be penetrated by the standard law enforcement methods that were once effective in collapsing organized crime groups.

Hacktivism exists because the Internet is an open society that has no boundaries in which normal legal process can be applied without taking significant and draconian action, like direct control of the systems that keep the Internet alive. The traditional legal requirements for evidence are hampered by the very void in which the elites live.           More