Lulzsec, a group that some people applauded. The were showing security holes. Well, truth is they are a bunch of bullies and jerks.
I love music. More so, I enjoy some Internet Radio Stations. I find a lot of the smaller ones tend to play all sorts of stuff I have not heard before, and broaden my musical tastes. These independent stations will go through the FCC to make sure they are compliant with the outrageous Licensing fees that the music industry puts on them. The FCC is even willing to help pay for that licensing, in turn for a few small things such as playing 5 minutes of real news every so often. Its something the government does right.
So when a few of the stations I listen to all of a sudden had problems with their web sites, and a few had problems with their streams, I figured I would talk to the tech people and see if I could help. Each one of them gave me a similar story of what was going on. Lulzsec was trying to blackmail them. Yep, these independent stations, all of whom get some help from the government, were facing DDOS attacks from Lulzsec. That was not the only thing. They are getting automated phone calls from Lulzsec demanding the admin password for their radio streams so Lulzsec can break in whenever they want to and take over the station.
I won’t mention the names of the stations, since they have called in the FBI on this. I just look at this and go, what a bunch of script kiddie jerks. I mean if Lulzsec were the “Elite” hackers they claim to be, couldn’t then have just hacked the servers that host the radio stream and taken it over that way? Heck, most Internet Radio Stations use either IceCast or Shoutcast stream servers. those servers tend to be Linux based, and usually have Apache on them. How do I know this? Well, I help some volunteer radio stations with tech at times, so I have learned the setup. Heck for that matter, I set up a Shoutcast server at my house so I could do some testing, and stream music to my different devices around the house. It isn’t that difficult. If Lulzsec wants to broadcast over the Internet, and they are such high end people, then why not just make their own server for streaming, like they do for their IRC?
Think about it. If a group is so boisterous, it wants the press. It wants to be heard. The most elite in the hacking world though, you will never hear a peep from. They lurk in the shadows. They keep their egos in check. They create things for those kiddies that want the attention. Those are the tough ones to find. Until then, we have to keep dealing with jerks like Lulzsec.