Week 3 Post: 9/11, From Hijackers to Hackers

For most people in our nation, September 11th will live on to be a day that commemorates a dark hour in our nation's past.  Yet this year the 10th anniversary was mocked by online hackers.  While the rest of the nation was involved in respectful and solemn ceremonies, remembering the lives taken in the attacks on New York and Washington, a group of hackers took the event as their cue to perform online shenanigans.

On Friday, a hacker group notorious for hacking media outlets hijacked the NBC News Twitter account and posted fabricated accounts of attacks on "Ground Zero" in New York.  The group posted messages saying that there was a plane crash at the site following a suspected hijacking.

The group responsible for the postings later unmasked themselves with the following message: “NBCNEWS hacked by the Script Kiddies.”

It seems that the group breached the account via a spear phishing attack.  There are only 3 people who have the password to the account.  Following this attack, Ryan Osborn (NBC Social Media Director) admitted to MSNBC that he had recently opened an attachment in an e-mail sent to him from an unknown sender.

Prior to this attack, the Script Kiddies gained notoriety with their 4^th of July attacks on the Fox News Twitter account.  In that debacle, they posted a series of false messages claiming that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

The Script Kiddies were not the only group engaging in criminal activity surrounding 9/11; another group which identifies itself with the moniker Team Poison ran a campaign in which they were petitioning for support from the masses to call the federal government and protest U.S. foreign policy.  The group posted a listing phone numbers on the internet.  The numbers were for the White House, U.S. embassies in Libya and Afghanistan, the FBI and the CIA.  They were asking its followers to call these numbers and leave the following message: “Dear USA, your 9/11 is our 24/7.  Sincerely, [a country that has been bombed/attacked by the USA].”

The group was hoping that the result of mass phone calls would have a huge effect on business. But it would seem that their efforts were largely in vain because much of the Federal government is closed on Sundays so there wasn’t much business to disrupt.

Team Poison had gained some infamy when they defaced a website operated by Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes the Blackberry Smartphone.  The attack on RIM was spawned because of RIM’s cooperation with the London police during the London riots.

Team Poison has also attacked other hacker groups.  They took down the LulzSec website because they felt that its members were inferior hackers.

Reference:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/239824/911_anniversary_spurs_hacker_mischief.html