PatrickPretty.com

Tag: DDoS

  • PP BLOG POST NO. 1,500: ‘Anonymous’ Data Cannons, The Conscription Of The Unwitting Public To Wage An Electronic War On Law Enforcement — And Google And The ‘C’ Word

    Dear Readers,

    This PP Blog post is No. 1,500 since we switched to the WordPress platform in December 2008. Two years later, in December 2010, we commemorated our 1,000th post in this letter to readers, which rued the lionization of fools and hucksters on the Internet and questioned whether criminals and anarchists hold the upper hand.

    God help us if they do.

    Our concern that they might only was heightened last week with the DDoS attacks in which electronic data cannons were aimed at the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, other U.S. government agencies and well-known recording-business entities after an indictment was unsealed in the Megaupload racketeering and copyright conspiracy case. There now are reports that a government site in Brazil was targeted, as well as the site of a Brazilian entertainer and other U.S. sites.

    Yes, electronic cannons — specifically Low Orbit Ion Cannons that had been fired from secret bedroom and home-office bunkers in a contemptible display of criminality that had been trained on sites paid for by taxpayers and legitimate business entities and designed to knock them offline.

    There are reports that Anonymous, the hacker’s collective that took credit for firing the electronic cannons, duped people who did not want to fire cannons at sites paid for by taxpayers and consumers into firing those cannons. Otherwise law-abiding folks reportedly were drafted into a conspiracy to attack government property, also known as taxpayer property, by computer code placed by Anonymous that turned their machines into information-killing weapons.

    Putting it another way, Anonymous reportedly orchestrated an attack on U.S. government servers and conscripted unwitting participants to fire electronic weapons at websites operated by agencies whose mission is to keep the public safe from criminals: alleged would-be presidential assassins such as Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho; Ponzi schemers and six-time felons such as Anthony Ray of Georgia; securities schemers such as Jenifer Devine of New Jersey; scammers who target seniors internationally such as Dennis Bolze of Tennessee; alleged con men such as Andy Bowdoin of Florida; purported “sovereign citizens” such as Kenneth Wayne Leaming of Washington state.

    Read more about Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom in the DailyMail. Anonymous apparently is putting him forth as a role model.

    The attacks in which unwitting participants reportedly found themselves unwillingly married to committed anarchists occurred within hours of Wednesday’s civil protests of the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy bills by Google, Wikipedia and others.

    ‘Anonymous’ Rains On Google’s Civics Parade

    Neither Google nor Wikipedia got much of a chance to take a victory lap and marvel in their abilities to enlist the public to cow lawmakers and stop legislation in its tracks. That’s because the Justice Department announced the Megaupload copyright prosecutions under existing law on Thursday, a day after Google used the “c” word (censor) and Wikipedia staged its blackout. The Anonymous cannon attacks on public and private websites soon began, and the attacks quickly darkened and short-circuited the afterglow and PR bonanzas Google and Wikipedia had enjoyed during the 24 hours in which their presumptively utopian protests unfolded.

    After being shown by Google and Wikipedia that Internet users practicing viral civics can freeze politicians during a U.S. Presidential election year in which 33 Senate seats and all 435 House seats also will be up for grabs, some lawmakers did manage to scrape up enough courage to allow that something specific needed to be done about online piracy.

    But whatever needed to be done could be done later, the cowed politicians ventured, apparently after even more jobs, wealth and creativity get stolen by pirates who know that law enforcement’s battle against piracy is constrained by budgets, Congressional disputes, international borders, masked IPs and unthinking or downright criminal consumers who buy stolen property from pirates whose sympathizers include the anarchists who wield Low Orbit Ion Cannons.

    Although Google and Wikipedia were hardly alone in their negative views about the proposed legislation, the opportunistic cannon attack by Anonymous that followed provided a stark reminder that extremists can hijack a presumptively well-meaning online civics lesson in a heartbeat and turn it into an international-security drama.

    And because Anonymous is a loose coalition, the opportunity for “lone wolves” with their own destructive agendas to emerge from within the ranks of Anonymous is high. If someone in Anonymous decides he or she is opposed to, say, Sunday church picnics, then any church that hosts such an event and promotes it on the Internet could have its website targeted by Low Orbit Icon Cannons.

    The PP Blog is feeling less free today on the Internet, the purported last bastion of freedom of expression. Although this Blog champions the First Amendment, its does not champion instances in which criminals hide behind the First Amendment to cover up or rationalize their crimes as a lawful expression of protected speech.

    We wonder if our advocacy for law enforcement and content creators could invite Low Orbit Cannon-firers to train their sights anew on us, thus subjecting us to the mercies of a mob that empowers itself to silence our voice while it champions its own with the conscription of a viral mob. At the same time, we wonder if our publication of certain court documents could cause cannons to be trained on judges and prosecutors and investigators and crime victims, thus delaying or derailing prosecutions and putting the government and individual officers on the defense against criminals.

    What happens, say, if an autosurf or HYIP with 500,000 members who purport to be Christians spreading the word that Jesus wants them to be rich decides the best way to derail a prosecution is to share a Low Orbit Ion Cannon among all members of the enterprise — or to create tens of thousands of websites designed to obscure or bury government and consumer-reporter warnings about international mass-marketing fraud?

    And what happens of Congress decides to author specific legislation against HYIPs and autosurfs after learning that the largest sports stadiums may not be big enough to accommodate all the victims of a single scam — and an army of Bible-toting scammers start crashing servers or waging a disingenuous PR war against public servants and calling it free speech or an exercise in civics or civil disobedience?

    This is not the America we knew in the first 20 years of our journalism career. Something has gone horribly wrong in the past four or five years — and much of what has gone horribly wrong is attributable to viral criminals and their disingenuous cheerleaders and abettors on the Internet.

    A PP Blog companion site that featured news about Ponzi schemes was destroyed by pirates hiding behind servers on the other side of the world. The site’s content was scraped 100 percent and monetized. The thieves used us as their free labor force. It killed our site and our desire to keep it online.

    The PP Blog itself has survived DDoS attacks and has received a claim of responsibility — not from Anonymous, but from a purported advocate for HYIPs and online money schemes. It’s hard to count all the threats or bids to chill us that we’ve received, and we long ago reached the point that only a machine can count the bids to spam the Blog with offers for obvious scams or solicitations to visit piracy sites.

    For each published post, the Blog — on average — has received 100.09 spam communications. Looking at it another way, 100 scammers (or perhaps a smaller number with the ability to create the impression of scale) try to take advantage of the Blog’s work and ride its bandwidth and brand for every post we publish. Their business model is to flood antiscam sites with advertisements for individual scams.

    At the moment, the scammers appear to be concentrating on PP Blog stories involving the emerging OneX scheme.

    We are doing our best to keep you informed and are trying to out-think the scammers and criminals. Please help keep us around for Post 2,000.

     

  • AlertPay Says It Was Targeted In DDoS Attack Last Week; Unclear Who Launched Assault; Site Processed Payments For Club Asteria And Other Collapsed HYIP And Money-Cycler ‘Programs’ Promoted On Ponzi Boards

    UPDATED 9:45 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) AlertPay, a Canadian payment processor referenced frequently on Ponzi boards such as TalkGold and MoneyMakerGroup, announced on its Blog that it was subjected to a “large” DDoS attack last week that affected customers’ ability to access the site.

    In a Blog post dated Wednesday, the company said the DDoS attack began on Aug. 16.

    “We have measures in place to mitigate such attacks but when the intensity of the attack traffic peaks, said measures can occasionally drop legitimate traffic to the site,” AlertPay said. The firm’s website appears to be loading quickly today.

    No customer information was compromised in the attack, AlertPay said. The firm did not say whether it had identified a suspect in the attack or whether the attackers had provided a reason for targeting the firm.

    “Solving an issue like this unfortunately takes a bit of time to tweak appropriately so please bear with us while we attempt to adjust our filters and improve the situation,” the company said.

    AlertPay processes payments for Club Asteria, according to Club Asteria members who complained when Club Asteria reported earlier this year that it had suspended member cashouts after acknowledging its PayPal account had been frozen. Some Club Asteria members reported on the TalkGold Ponzi board that they continued to be paid through AlertPay after the PayPal freeze and despite the payout suspension Club Asteria had announced.

    Club Asteria traded on the name of the World Bank, targeting a purported Club Asteria “revenue sharing” offer to the world’s poor.

    Promotions for Club Asteria claimed the Virginia-based firm had recruited more than 300,000 members, was gaining thousands of new members each week and was on target to register 1 million members by the end of 2011.  Some Club Asteria members simultaneously were promoting a purported “opportunity” known as Centurion Wealth Circle.

    In short order, Centurion’s website then disappeared amid reports of a Ponzi collapse, but later reappeared. Reports soon surfaced that Centurion intended to implement a feeder cycler known as “The Tornado” to prop up its original, collapsed cycler. Members claimed AlertPay processed payments for both Centurion and “The Tornado.”

    Early reports on the MoneyMakerGroup Ponzi forum about the effectiveness of “The Tornado” in reversing the financial course of Centurion are confusing. Accompanying those reports are confusing reports that a second version of “The Tornado” is coming soon and that Centurion will contact “free” members to make sure they have a chance to pay Centurion for a membership “upgrade” that will permit them to get in on the action.

    Prior to its reappearance after an absence of days, Centurion’s DNS information suggested that the firm’s website had been disabled for spamming.

    Centurion, according to the MoneyMakerGroup post, now says its first implementation of “The Tornado” resulted in “13 HUNDRED POSITIONS earning many members good commissions & bonuses all round.”

    The firm, according to the MoneyMakerGroup post, did not say how much money it gathered in the first use of “The Tornado.”

    But a second implementation of “The Tornado” will be tweaked to make it even more “exciting” than the recently completed first, according to the MoneyMakerGroup post, which was dated today.

    “The next Tornado will run for 24 hours only,” Centurion was quoted in the MoneyMakerGroup post as saying. “It will consist of just one phase at 200%. The most exciting part is [. . .] we will run a a (sic) two way cycler that wont (sic) cross over each other. What this means is when the left-to-right cycler meets the right-to-left cycler they will both start again!!

    “This spreads the profits more evenly and ensures more positions profit – especially the later entries!” Centurion was quoted as saying. “All entries in the Tornado are worth 2 Product Tokens and these will be added to members main account! A Brand NEW Wealth Creation System is coming – Premium Members Only!”

    Earlier this year, AlertPay processed payments for Exotic FX, another program widely promoted on the Ponzi boards. Some Club Asteria members also promoted Exotic, which billed itself a “PRIVATE ASSET HAVEN.”

    Exotic appears to have collapsed in the spring, roughly at the same time Club Asteria was collapsing. The dollar value of Exotic member losses is unclear, and the firm’s website no longer loads. There were reports that AlertPay had blocked Exotic’s access to funds prior to the collapse. Exotic’s domain now resolves to a page that beams ads.

    AlertPay also processed payments for Pathway to Prosperity, which the U.S. Postal Inspection Service described last year as a collapsed $70 million Ponzi scheme that had spread to 120 countries over the Internet and created 40,000 victims.

    Separately, AlertPay’s name is referenced in U.S. Secret Service allegations against AdSurfDaily, an autosurf  company accused of propping itself up by creating at least three other feeder Ponzi schemes after its original Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2007. The ASD scheme allegedly gathered at least $110 million though a series of payment processors. The firm also used Bank of America to collect payments, according to filings by federal prosecutors and a private racketeering lawsuit brought against ASD President Andy Bowdoin by three ASD members in January 2009.

    Hank Needham, a Club Asteria principal, also was an ASD pitchman, according to web records. Club Asteria launched in the aftermath of the Secret Service seizure of tens of millions of dollars from Bowdoin in 2008.

    Like Club Asteria, Centurion Wealth Circle, “The Tornado,” Exotic FX and Pathway To Prosperity, ASD also was promoted on the Ponzi boards.

    It is common on the Ponzi boards for members to promote two or more fraud schemes simultaneously. One Club Asteria member who also promoted Centurion has claimed he participates in 35 forums.