Anonymous Threatens Internet With “Operation Blackout”

Anonymous has promised to blow up the entire internet at the end of the month.

You might want to stock up on freeze-dried food and 5.56mm ammunition over the next day or so, or at the very least a book or two you’ve been putting off, because Anonymous, the wild ghost riders of the internet, are pulling the plug on March 31.

“To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, on March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down,” a message on Pastebin warns. To be precise, Anonymous isn’t actually trying to “kill” the internet, a fact the message readily admits. Instead, it’s just going to make it a pain in the ass to use for awhile.

“In order to shut the Internet down, one thing is to be done. Down the 13 root DNS servers of the Internet. By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name look-up, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web,” the message explains. “Anybody entering ‘http://www.google.com’ or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.”

Technical details about how “Operation Blackout” will work, as well as instructions on taking part [which, to be clear, I am absolutely not encouraging anyone to do] are included in the message. “It may only last one hour, maybe more, maybe even a few days,” the message says. “No matter what, it will be global. It will be known.” It concludes with the usual rambling justification for shenanigans and of course the “We are Anonymous etc.” boilerplate.

Can this work? It sounds reasonable enough, at least for those of us who don’t know what “the ramp linux client is located under the ramplinux folder and needs a working installation of python and scapy” means, but I’m sure the more technically adroit among us will ride in soon enough with reassurances that it’s all a bunch of impossibly nonsensical technobabble and we have nothing to worry about. Or, conversely, that the end of the world is nigh. Either way, we’ll find out for sure on Saturday!

via: GamePolitics