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What's interesting is that the sophistication of the attack is immaterial to the fact that they achieved a significant security disclosure. You don't have to be a sophisticated hacker to perpetrate meaningful hacks, you just have to be more sophisticated than the target of your attack. This is what makes the Anonymous movement so fascinating to me. In Anonymous culture, being "dox'd" is a big deal. That's kind of end-game stuff for hackers. Once you're outed, you're out. Coincidentally, the same rules apply for espionage. What makes this doubly interesting is that Anonymous is made up of young, tech-savvy individuals. The establishment (government, large corporations, etc) increasingly rely on tools that are created, or at least well understood, by their attackers. It's a classical asymmetric battlefield problem. The attackers aren't big, but they have some very specific domain knowledge, and are increasing in sophistication over time. That previous paragraph is probably way to generous in my evaluation of the skill level represented inside Anonymous, but that's a large part of the problem. We don't really know much about the insides of Anonymous by design. As the establishment pushes harder and harder (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) to enforce the status quo, who will turn? There's a tipping point at which the establishment can no longer wage the battle. Acquiring the talent becomes too expensive and breaks their business model. |