VietNamNet Bridge - Security experts pointed out that the action by some Vietnamese teenagers breaking into the Anonymous chatting website did not cause any danger, commenting that the behavior was ‘seen’ and ‘easy to implement’.



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On November 18, #OpParis, a subordinate Twitter website of the well-known group of hackers set up to condemn the terrorism case in Paris, said that the group’s chatting channel at webirc became inaccessible. The group’s members were then advised to go out instead of staying at home chatting as usual.

Several hours later, an account named ‘Phisher’ who has relations with Anonymous, stated that he knew the culprit – five young hackers from Vietnam. As a warning, Phisher tracked down the hackers and made public the personal information about the hackers, including their Facebook and Youtube accounts, and their recent online activities. 

Ngo Tuan Anh, deputy chair of the Bach Khoa Antivirus Center (BKAV), a well-known security firm, commented that the action taken by the group of hackers was ‘in no way dangerous’ and it could be easily conducted. 

“The information that guides the way of conducting attacks could be easily found on internet,” Anh said, adding that hackers did not need to have deep knowledge about security to be able to do it.

Anonymous’ chatting channel on webirc is by nature a website based on IRC mode, old technology that came into life even before the chatting software such as IM, Yahoo! And MSN.

Though the mode is old, hackers still like to exchange information through IRC because the protocol does not require users to register and log in, and they just need to enter names to chat with each other. 

To destroy the chatting website, the young hackers programmed the ‘bots’, s kind of simple software which can automatically create hundreds of nicknames, then accessed Anonymous’ IRC chatting channel and published meaningless content (Spam), creating stuck traffic. 

“This was quite a low-level destructive behavior,” commented Nguyen H Tran, a member of a security forum in Vietnam. “Anonymous did not apply defensive measures because IRC webchat is a shared tool made in a rudimentary way with no security measure, while no one would think of trying to destroy it."

Tran believes that the young hackers who conducted the attack might just try to catch Anonymous’ and the public’s attention or show off their ‘trophies’, because they are far from a danger to Anonymous. However, the behavior is not encouraged by hackers.

Meanwhile, a hacker in HCM City commented it is not worthwhile to ‘be proud of the high ability of Vietnamese hackers to attack Anonymous’ website’, saying this is just ‘conflict among hackers in the virtual world’.

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