Anti-government hacktivists mark Lenin’s birthday with a record
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Hackers are snapping up a popular cyber tool at a breakneck pace.
In the Department of Interesting Coincidences, by April 22, the birthday of Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, cyberactivists this year had downloaded a popular tool for disrupting government websites more than 380,000 times -- matching and then exceeding the number of downloads for the entire previous year. Happy birthday from one generation of activists to the father of another.
According to a report by computer researchers at cybersecurity firm Imperva, downloads of the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, or LOIC, spiked toward the end of January, when hacker activist group Anonymous claimed more than 5,000 supporters were using the program to clog servers running Justice.gov and FBI.gov.
“This week, total LOIC downloads exceeded the total downloads from last year,” wrote Rob Rachwald, Imperva security strategy director. “It only took four months or, more precisely, 112 days.”
The LOIC executes denial-of-service attacks by lodging junk traffic at a site to freeze it. The purported assailants said at the time they were virtually picketing a pending anti-piracy bill that would have allowed the Justice Department to shutter sites trafficking in intellectual property, which they equated to online censorship.
“There was a large burst of downloads early in the year driven by attacks on the FBI and other government agencies,” Rachwald wrote.
Most of the applications were downloaded in the United States this year, as was the case in 2011, while France again came in second. Imperva noted that Brazil bumped Germany from the No. 3 spot, when Latin American activists took to their computers to rally against big banks and downloads soared 60 percent.
Between Jan. 1 and the Soviet radical’s birthday last month, there had been 384,358 downloads in all, according to the research. Ninety percent of all users this year were on a Microsoft Windows operating system. Since the January spike, transfers have declined, Rachwald said, likely because the program has been converted to a format called Javascript, which does not require downloading.