British intelligence used DDoS attacks against Anonymous

The British Government Communications Center (GCHQ) used hacker techniques, including DDoS attacks, against the hacker group Anonymous. This is evidenced by new documents from Edward Snowden, writes Mashable.

While anonymous hackers attacked websites with DDoS in 2011, the British and American authorities tried to find opposition - and GCHQ decided to use the hackers' weapons against them.

According to published documents , a GCHQ division called the United Threat Intelligence Research Group (JTRIG) launched the Rolling Thunder operation against the hacker group in 2011. This operation included the use of DDoS attacks on the servers hosting Anonymous's chats, as well as the introduction of malicious programs to neutralize the hackers' actions and their identification.
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This is the first time that GCHQ, which is the British counterpart of the NSA, was directly accused of using hacker techniques in its anti-crime activities, and this is the first time that a government agency was directly accused of using DDoS attacks.

However, in general, cases have already been known when other law enforcement agencies used hacker methods. For example, the FBI uses malware to hack and track suspected computers. In one case, the department installed its own malware on a potential terrorist’s computer with the help of phishing.

However, critics of such methods claim that the authorities use double standards: when Anonymous uses DDoS attacks, it is a crime, and when GCHQ is not. Gabriella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at McGill University, who is researching Anonymous, believes that this is an overreaction that can stifle the freedom of expression of innocent Internet users.

“A serious concern is this approach,“ firing from all guns ”to justice, scattering punishment on thousands of people who exercise the democratic right to protest simply because a small handful of people committed digital vandalism,” writes Coleman in Wired. “This is a kind of overreaction, which usually happens when the government tries to crush dissent; it is not much different from what happens in other, more repressive countries. ”

One of the hackers Anonymous, Jake Davis, who was arrested in 2012 and later pleaded guilty to participating in two DDoS attacks, also sharply criticized the GCHQ: “There is no excuse for how blithely democratic a government can be when it violates the same rules about illegal use of computer technology, which it itself pushed through for adoption. ”

The British agency stated the legitimacy of its actions: “All the work of GCHQ is carried out strictly within the legal and political framework that ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate.”