Anonymous fooled bystanders into taking part in Megaupload revenge attacks

Until now, Anonymous has relied on volunteers to help with attacks, but last week’s Operation Megaupload fooled bystanders into taking part simply by clicking a link. This change in tactic from Anonymous, which allows attacks to be launched by simply clicking on a link, means that Internet users need to be extremely careful when clicking on unknown URLs or they could unwittingly be joining this latest zombie army.” However Jennifer Granick, a computer crime defence attorney, disagreed : “If you are an unwitting participant then technically you’re not liable under the law because all criminal statutes, with some narrow exceptions, require some criminal state of mind, such as acting “knowingly” or “intentionally”. That’s probably unlikely, depending on how many computers are involved in the DDOS attack.” Granick was clear on the liability of those distributing the links, however: “If you are a distributor of malware that targets a site, you can be liable for all damage that occurs to that site as a result of the malware functioning.” This new technique for mounting DDoS attacks is disturbing, because it means that any link you see on Twitter or Facebook could potentially lead you to unknowingly take part in an attack. The safest thing now would be to avoid clicking anything to do with operation megaupload or Anonymous-especially if it’s a mysterious Pastehtml link.” Anonymous has said that “5,635 people [were> confirmed using #LOIC to bring down sites,” but as Chen points out, there was “no word on how many of those were unwilling participants.”