Previously, Anonymous has leaked details of the Orange Country Democrats. Now, it seems, they have decided to post source code and blacklist data of a Dutch ISP after the ISP decided to act on government requests to censor Internet traffic.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
The wave of hacking has yet to subside at all if the latest activity is any indication. Information regarding the latest data dump has been posted to pastebin while VOIP blocking data has been posted to PasteHTML (Caution: multiple certificate errors) and source code from servers have been posted to MediaFire – a file that appears to be about 4.25MB.
Anonymous has released a statement in regard to this latest release:
To all friendly and enemy vessels,
Today we want to introduce you to Nimbuzz, a Dutch company providing a free mobile messaging application carrying the same name. This company is not situated in just the Netherlands as they have offices in Argentina, India, Indonesia and all over Europe. So why does this company interest us? Well, simply put, they are capable and self-admittingly willing to co-operate with governments to help censor the public’s use of the very service they offer.
Now it should be noted that some of our blackhat friends who are extensively involved in the AntiSec movement have had access to this company’s networks for some time. Their access to this network is best described as complete access to everything in their network including all of their source code on Nimbuzz’s svn server. The gross incompetence of the security model put in place for this server astounded even us.
We have access to many many networks and because of this we have to prioritize what is of interest or use to us (or you, the public that we love so much). However, we had some friends bring it to our attention that this Nimbuzz company is actually enacting policies that directly go against everything Antisec stands for. Thus, here we are.
To prove that we aren’t making this up here is a document in their CMS displaying the procedure of how, if requested, they can switch off VOIP services BY GOVERNMENT REQUEST. A quote from the document:
“In some countries governments and/or operators have reasons for not allowing VoIP over (mobile) data networks. They may use technical means to active block and / or throttle the Nimbuzz traffic over their network. This results in total, partial or severe Nimbuzz service degradation towards the end-user.
When these cases are known, Nimbuzz will open dialogue with the government/operator. Aim is to resolve the service degradation and restore quality of service. In return for allowing Nimbuzz service to run properly, we can offer to switch of VoIP calls on this operator network.”
The document goes further to state that Nimbuzz currently blocks all VOIP traffic in Syria and Egypt and even includes specific data such as IP ranges given by providers.
This is entirely unacceptable and let’s make this perfectly clear:
We DO NOT tolerate any kind of censorship of communication.
We DO NOT tolerate companies working in collusion with governments to stop the free flow of information
We WILL expose these companies to the public to show how their information can be manipulated and censored by the governments and corporations that work with them
Thus, we release the document mentioned above in full as well as some other information from their CMS. As a bonus we have also acquired some code from the /trunk directory on their svn. In total we downloaded over 120 Gigabyte of source code but will not release it..yet.
Take heed, governments that seek to oppose the people who elect them and the corporations who the people work for – We will not stand idly by while you take away our electronic and physical freedom.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
This development is interesting because late last month, an Australian ISP hesitated on implementing government mandated censorship fearing “reprisals” from groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec. While the ISP has moved forward with their censorship plans, it seems that Anonymous has shown that they won’t hesitate to retaliate against ISPs who support or are co-operative with government mandated censorship.
So far, this isn’t looking like things are going to end well for one entity at the very least.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
