Anonymous Releases Very Unanonymous Press Release
Today, December 10th, Anonymous, an Internet gathering, released a press release which you can read below. In it, a description is provided of what Anonymous is about, what Operation Payback is, and where the media is getting it wrong. Also in it, its author forgot to remove his name in the pdf’s Meta information.
Press Release
ANON OPS: A Press Release
Document Properties
Um, Alex Tapanaris…?
Document Author: Alex Tapanaris
Full Press Release Text
ANON OPS: A Press Release December 10, 2010
Who is Anonymous In their most recent public statement, WikiLeaks is the only group of people to identify Anonymous correctly. Anonymous is not a group, but rather an Internet gathering.
Both Anonymous and the media that is covering it are aware of the percieved dissent between individuals in the gathering. This does not, however, mean that the command structure of Anonymous is failing for a simple reason: Anonymous has a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives.
We do not believe that a similar movement exists in the world today and as such we have to learn by trial and error. We are now in the process of better communicating some core values to the individual atoms that comprise Anonymous – we also want to take this opportunity to communicate a message to the media, so that the average Internet Citizen can get to know who we are and what we represent.
Anonymous is not a group of hackers. We are average Interent Citizens ourselves and our motivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day.
We do not want to steal your personal information or credit card numbers. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our current goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks’ ability to function.
What is Operation: Payback As stated above, the point of Operation: Payback was never to target critical infrastructure of any of the companies or organizations affected. Rather than doing that, we focused on their corporate websites, which is to say, their online “public face”. It is a symbolic action – as blogger and academic Evgeny Morozov put it, a legitimate expression of dissent.
The background to the attacks on PayPal and the calls to attack Amazon.com Amazon, which was until recently WikiLeaks’ DNS provider, was one of the first companies to drop support for WikiLeaks. On December 9th, BusinessInsider.com reported that Amazon.co.uk were hosting the recently leaked diplomatic cables in e-book form. (Amazon.co.uk has since ceased selling the bundle of the diplomatic cables.)
After this piece of news circulated, parts of Anonymous on Twitter asked for Amazon.com to be targetted. The attack never occured.
While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in a DDoS attack, this is not the only reason the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertised in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.
The continuing attacks on PayPal are already tested and preferable: while not damaging their ability to process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people to notice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.
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Filed Under: Funny
Show some respect for your sources. Please. We both know where you got this tit bit from. As a journo I would expect more poise. That is all. x
Not sourced, and not a journalist, but I like the sentiment Robin.
Kudos to Paul Rankin who first identified this:
http://paulrankin.tumblr.com/post/2166282743/anonymous-has-supposedly-released-a-press-release
The guy you replied to discovered it.
Go ahead, click his name…
See?
Says who, you and him?
That’s a little better…
Anyone know what program Paul Rankin used to look at the pdf metadata like that?
The screenshot above is from our lab machine, but it is just the dialog box when you right click and look at the document’s properties in Adobe Reader.
Paul Rankin did the same thing (but using a Mac).
The further analysis was done with Didier Steven’s pdf-parser tool.
That’s what I was thinking but thought that would be much too easy to discover. Amazing no one took the time to even look at the basic metadata accessible to anyone with a simple right-click… I am dumbfounded.
info of alex tapanaris http://bit.ly/h15085
I’m Julian Assange (aka Mendax) – despite being told by friendly intelligence agencies I should avoid getting caught in a sex sting, taking insane technical and physical security precautions and apparently fearing for my life, I couldn’t manage to keep my cock in my pants when a couple of Swedish groupies threw themselves at me back in August. As a result of being a huge fucking nerd, I am now in a British Jail awaiting my ultimate extradition to the USA for Espionage Act charges.
[...] Anonymous envía un comunicado de prensa no tan "anomimo" [ENG] praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/12/anonymous-releases… por nofacefarmer hace 2 segundos [...]
Hey you praetorians, have a look…. http://pastebin.com/F2VcJXkK
Rookie mistake. shakes head
Alex Tapinaris = “I likes tapping her ass”. You just lost… The Game
That’s a stretch. Would have gone with Heywood Jablome.
I like how you actually are falling for the fact that graphic design artist “Alex Tapinaris” actually created the document…you think the real author would leave his name in metadata? hahhaha, I personally would have used the name of someone now to “web famous”
Possible, but that’s also probably how a group would respond after the fact also to making that mistake.
I have no idea if it is him or not, that said the shortest path to zero is usually the quickest.
which the poster above points out…isn’t a real name anyway
Information security musings from a guy who opens pdf’s with reader, in a browser plugin, on windows, when the document’s sourced from a group running extensive ddos.
You forgot “in a VM”. We have a pretty good understanding of PDF vulnerabilities, windows and browser plug ins are a fact of life. Maybe take a tour around the site if you’re concerned with our credentials.
Timezone stored in metadata is +2. Greece is in TZ +2.
[...] you write certain blog posts, you expect to receive a lot of comments from the Intertubes. If you can imagine a social mixer [...]
[...] Initial analysis by Paul Rankin: http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/12/anonymous-releases-very-unanonymous-press-release/ [...]
[...] on est pas foutu de retirer des métadonnées d’un document Word, mieux vaut rester sur sa GameBoy [...]
I see ‘Anonymous’ newfag brigade has landed. Way to fail guys.
[...] PC source IP address nor that word processors store incriminating meta-data in revolutionary manifestos. In short, not exactly [...]
[...] not realize the tools do not anonymize their PC source IP address nor that word processors store incriminating meta-data in revolutionary manifestos. In short, not exactly the work of evil criminal [...]
[...] it wrong. Also in it, its author forgot to remove his name in the pdf’s Meta information. Praetorian Prefect Posted in Informationsecurity | Tags: Anonymous, press, Release, Releases, Unanonymous, [...]
[...] des datos personalesEsto es de preogrullo ¿o no tanto? pero ni se te ocurra dejar datos personales ¿intentamos ser anónimos o no? Son especialmente [...]
[...] Today, December 10th, Anonymous, an Internet gathering, released a press release which you can read below. In it, a description is provided of what Anonymous is about, what Operation Payback is, and where the media is getting it wrong. Also in it, its author forgot to remove his name in the pdf’s Meta information. Praetorian Prefect [...]
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