US Feature: A Beginner's Guide to "Occupy Wall Street" (Schneider)

Raw video from Associated Press of the march and arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge

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On Saturday, the 15th day of "Occupy Wall Street", New York City police arrested more than 700 protesters for blocking traffic lanes as they tried to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The march had started in the afternoon  from the protesters' camp in Zuccotti Park (Liberty Square) in downtown Manhattan, near the former World Trade Center. Demonstrators have vowed to stay at the park through the winter.

As "Occupy Wall Street" not only continues but grows, Nathan Schneider of The Nation offers a Beginners' Guide to the movement....

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Syria Image: Anonymous Hack Ministry of Defense Website

This morning the hacktivist collective Anonymous took over the website of Syria's Ministry of Defense. Videos of the military's killing of civilians and of claimed defections now scroll across the top of the site. Anonymous's logo occupies the centre of a Syrian flag. 

There is this message to the Syrian public: "The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side." And Anonymous also speaks to the military: "You are responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and anyone who orders you to kill women, children, and the elderly deserves to be tried for treason....Defend your country, rise up against the regime!"

Moments ago, the hacked page was replaced by a Server Default at Plesk Services: "If you see this page it means:1. hosting for this domain is not configured or 2. there's no such domain registered in Plesk

EA Cyber-Watch: Anonymous Launches Another Campaign Against PayPal

On Wednesday, the Web-based shopping outlet eBay opened to a 1% fall in its shares on the US stock market. The cause? The computer "hacktivists" Anonymous has resumed its campaign against the online payment company PayPal.

Last year, Anonymous launched a campaign against PayPal, as well as other financial and credit services like Visa and MasterCard, after the company refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website which had downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified US documents. 

Now #OpPayPal, called by Anonymous and their associates at LulzSec and Wikileaks, is protesting the company’s compliance with the FBI to charge and fine online actvisists. Mercedes Haefer, a 20-year-old Social Sciences student at the University of Nevada, is one of 14 defendants facing charges of "conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer", having taking part in a denial-of-service attack, with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

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EA Cyber-Special: Hijacked Fox News Twitter Feed "The President is Dead"

At around 0630 GMT, as we were setting up the Iran and North Africa/Middle East LiveBlogs, we noticed a series of disturbing updates from the Twitter account of Fox News Politics:

Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th

@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead. A sad 4th of July, indeed. President Barack Obama is dead

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EA Cyber-Special: LulzSec Dumps Its Documents and Says Good-Bye

The LulzSec crew, having sailed merrily into the waters of hacktivism this spring, has now dumped their treasure overboard and set course for calmer seas, no doubt with a fleet of law enforcement in pursuit.

The files released last night appear to be the user accounts of the cracked NATO bookshop customer database, an archive of AT&T corporate data, and an image establishing that LulzSec has cracked the US Navy's website. Details of accounts of gamers and those on other forums, an output of network data labelled "FBI being silly", and 91 pages of IP addresses whose routers were using default passwords were also included.

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EA Cyber-Special: What is LulzSec? And Is It More than a Bit of LOL and Mischief? (Dunne)

LulzSec's "Pierre DuBois"LulzSec --- the mischievous internet group responsible for infiltrating servers at Sony, Sega and the International Monetary, as well as disabling Government websites on both sides of the Atlantic --- has expanded its operation, codenamed AntiSec, to South America. Early on Wednesday, the group claimed to have disabled two websites of the Brazilian Government, Portal Brazil and the site of President Dilma Vana Rousseff.

The group maintains it is acting simply "for the Lulz", a play on "LOL", getting amusement from random digital anarchy. Fridays become "FF", the designated day of the week for dissemination of stolen material.

But is there a significance beyond mischief and laughs?

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Tunisia Cyber-Special: "Anonymous" Takes Down the Government

In an operation which has received surprisingly little attention, Anonymous --- the collective which defended WikiLeaks last month by attacking sites of institutions such as Visa, MasterCard, and the bank Swiss Post Finance --- has taken down the on-line presence of the Government of Tunisia.

On Monday, in a general protest supporting Tunisian demonstrations over the economy and in a specific response to the Government's censorship and surveillance of websites and social media (see separate entry), Anonymous attacked six sites of the Government, including those of the Prime Minister and its Ministries, and the site of a private bank.

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WikiLeaks CyberWar Update: Is Amazon UK Down?

UPDATE 13 DECEMBER: Amazon says a hardware failure, rather than an attack, took down its European sites for about 45 minutes on Sunday night.

A spokeswoman said, "The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt."

UPDATE 2145 GMT: All Amazon sites in Europe are back on-line.

UPDATE 2140 GMT: Amazon is now reporting "Performance Issues" with Amazon Simple Notification Service (Ireland) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Ireland).

UPDATE 2120 GMT: It is reported that the outage is because Amazon Data Services for Europe, based in Dublin, is down.

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WikiLeaks CyberWar Update: Visa, MasterCard Sites Still Off-Line

For earlier updates, see Wednesday's story....

UPDATE 1640 GMT: Tweet of the Day. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has tweeted, as the Department opens World Press Freedom Day, "No country believes in press freedom more than the United States. We practice what we preach."

UPDATE 1555 GMT:  WikiLeaks has issued a statement:  "These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with WikiLeaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. WikiLeaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.  Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: 'We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.'”

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