Date: Fri, 4 May 2012 17:34:16 +0000
From: "Thor (Hammer of God)" <thor@...merofgod.com>
To: Wei Honker <wei.honker@...il.com>, "full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk"
	<full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: cDc Created Hong Kong Blondes and
 'Hacktivism' as	a Media Hack

Got any decaf?  



Timothy "Thor"  Mullen
www.hammerofgod.com
Thor's Microsoft Security Bible



-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-bounces@...ts.grok.org.uk [mailto:full-disclosure-bounces@...ts.grok.org.uk] On Behalf Of Wei Honker
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2012 12:24 PM
To: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: [Full-disclosure] cDc Created Hong Kong Blondes and 'Hacktivism' as a Media Hack

cDc Created Hong Kong Blondes and 'Hacktivism' as a Media Hack

http://weihonker.tumblr.com/

Anonymous is a Lie

Anonymous is a lie. Anonymous is built on a false foundation that casts a pale shadow over anything and everything they attempt to accomplish. While born out of the trolls and lulz of the /b/ board on fourchan Anonymous has quickly become an online activist movement. The group has targeted everything from oppressive regimes in the Middle East, to opposition about Internet censorship. They have been launching DDoS attacks from the comfort of their basements while people in the street are literally gunned down and then they have the audacity to claim victory for themselves because they managed to take a website offline for a few hours. These actions, these minor irritations, have given Anonymous the audacity to call themselves hacktivists, a term that is itself a lie. By using the term hackivist or hacktivism Anonymous is helping to perpetuate one of the biggest media hacks of all time and they don't even know it.

Pulling pranks on the media has a long history with the computer underground. One of the best examples is the entire movie "Hackers"
which is so full of inside jokes they cease to be funny. Although when you examine the list of technical consultants the lack of humor makes sense. Hackers, the movie, is such a huge media hack the plot is used not once, but twice. The second time with Serena Achtul and the 'True Life" show on MTV. The show supposedly illustrates a so called 'hacker' who convinces Serena to follow him around while he attempts to retrieve a disk before the feds do, which is exactly the same plot used in the movie 'Hackers". Even after Serena and MTV where told they were being trolled they chose to air the footage anyway.

I don't know who from the computer underground was the first to execute a media hack but some of the best have come from the Cult of the Dead Cow. To give you an idea of just how prolific and proficient the cDc is at hacking the media consider that their slogan is 'World Domination through Media Saturation'. This is nowhere more apparent than the spectacle that was the BO2K release during Defcon in 1999. No software launch in recorded history; including those done by the media savvy Apple Inc., could touch this. Everything from smashing guitars to furry assless chaps to bad rap music with all the cDc members prancing around on stage as if it was the second coming. All that spectacle for nothing more than a remote access tool, something with almost the exact same feature set as PC Anywhere except that it runs on a different port number. Even Microsoft themselves said that BO2K wasn't a threat but the press ate it up anyway and cDc proved again that they were in fact master media manipulators.

Hactivism is another brainchild of cDc designed to fool and trick the media and all who choose to be associated with the term. The creation of the term is supposedly well documented as being first used by cDc member Omega in an IRC chat room in 1996. But close examination of the hacktivism Wikipedia page and that page's history shows a second possible source for the term, that of techno-culture writer Jason Sack in a piece about media artist Shu Lea Cheang, published in InfoNation in 1995 which pre-dates cDc's claim to the term. This co-option of the term itself is part of cDc's plan to execute the biggest media hack of all time encompassing all of 'hacktivism'.

But co-opting the term itself is not enough. cDc felt they needed something to take advantage of the term and to plunge it fully into the media spotlight. They came up with a fictitious international hacking group, a group who would only attack corporations that did not support human rights, and so the Hong Kong Blondes were born.

Reading the initial interview between the supposed Hong Kong Blondes leader 'Blondie Wong' and the cDc member 'Oxblood Ruffin' in cDc #356 now, fourteen years later, makes the entire ruse plainly obvious. Arik Hesseldahl, who ran the initial story in Wired based solely on this interview, with absolutely no corroborating evidence in the first place, has since privately expressed his doubts about the story. By publishing this article he unwittingly became the first rube in a long line of media rubes that the cDc played with ever increasing dexterity. Hesseldahl has most likely not publicly expanded on his misgivings over the story as it would draw attention to his original reservations and expose the fact that he failed to verify even one fact in the article.


The first thing that jumps out at me from the initial interview is that it was conducted by cDc member Oxblood Ruffin and published directly by him. No one else was present and no one else spoke to Blondie Wong and so no one can confirm the interview ever took place.
Which brings me to the second red flag, the use of the handles 'Blondie Wong' and 'Lemon Li'. Are these hacker handles supposed to be taken as legitimate or where they made up in an IRC chat room among half drunk and half high cDc members laughing themselves onto the floor? I won't even mention the part of Blondie traveling with armed guards, seriously, Hollywood would have a hard time topping this.

Next lets look at the claims that Blondie Wong and the Hong Kong Blondes supposedly temporarily disabled a Chinese communications satellite. China only had three official satellites at the time. Of course there is no confirmation of this claim from anyone either, not the Chinese, who probably would have pointed the finger at the US if it were true, or anyone else. But there is no mention anywhere of any Chinese satellite anomalies of any sort. Considering the large number of claims over the years of hackers attacking satellites, all of which have been proven to be false, it is highly unlikely that the HKBs succeeded where everyone else has failed.

Then just as quickly as it began it was over. Within six month cDc officially cut ties with the Hong Kong Blondes and bid them ado.
Oxblood wrote a tear-stained letter to his best buddy Blondie Wong in cDc #361 and the group formally cut ties with a press release in December, a press release signed by the cDc 'Minister of Propaganda'
and asking for all movie deals to be forwarded to him. But if the hack was going so well, with the media now using earlier uncorroborated stories to corroborate the current stories, why stop now? Why not build a massive Hong Kong Blonde media empire? Why? Because the Chinese government was starting to actually believe the bovine excrement the cDc was shoveling.

Some of the members of the cDc received visits from associates of the Chinese diplomatic core at their homes, and by Diplomatic core I mean the Ministry of State Security for the People's Republic of China.
Having men in suits show up on your doorstep, regardless of which country they are from, was seen by members of cDc as taking a simple media hack a little too far. And so, just as quickly as the HKBs began, they disappeared, never to be heard from again, except in the echo's of Oxblood Ruffin as he pontificates about the origins of hacktivism.

Hacktivists and Hactivism pretty much went away after that. Sure it was around here and there but very few DDoS attacks and website defacements contained any sort of political or activist message. Those that did where mostly attributed to angry teenagers and not to activist organizations practicing hacktivism. That is until Anonymous came along. Anonymous quickly graduated from the trolling and the lulz that was /b/ and needed something to latch onto out in the real Internet, something to give their actions legitimacy, to draw in new members, and to evoke sympathy from the general population. The irony of all ironies is that the media gave Anonymous what they needed by labeling the leaderless collective as hacktivists.

Of course once Anonymous had something they thought was legitimate they ran with it, waving the hactivism banner far and wide.
Unfortunately, the whole thing is a lie, a media hack perpetrated by the ultimate masters of the lulz, cDc. A hack so lulzy and so pervasive it is still being laughed about by cDc members today.
Anonymous unfortunately is oblivious to the fact that that they are just one more piece in the most epic media hack of all time, a media hack that has existed for over a decade and is now responsible for labeling an entire movement. Unfortunately, it's no longer a joke and it's no longer funny. It is time for Oxblood and the rest of the cDc to own up to their shenanigans and set the record straight.

If Anonymous truly wants to make a difference they need to evolve beyond the simple DDoS attacks, web defacements and the media hack that currently defines hacktivsm and become the movement they want to be.

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_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/

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