Swedish police link cyber attacks to Assange case

[struggle4progress]

Source: The Local

Published: 2 Oct 12 07:21 CET

... On Monday, a number of Swedish government agencies, banks, and media outlets – including The Local – had their websites crippled by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack.

During a DDOS attack, a website is bombarded with communication requests so that the servers become overloaded and the site crashes.

According to Anders Ahlqvist, an IT expert with the National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen), the attacks are clearly connected to efforts by Sweden to extradite Assange from the UK to be questioned in an ongoing sex crimes investigation ...

Monday's attack left the websites for Swedish banks SEB and Swedbank offline for extended periods around midday. Internet brokerage Nordnet was also affected ...



Read more: http://www.thelocal.se/43558/20121002/

[a geek named Bob]

1. sites doesn't impress me... n/t

[RobertEarl]

2. What do you know?

Read that Assange is actually being used by the black-ops to distribute only SOME information.

SOME info being info that has a certain agenda.

What do you know about that, s4p?

[AntiFascist]

6. Is that the report that Assange is actually a Mossad agent?

Some reports just aren't believable. Why would Mossad allow release of information that might make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq look bad?

[RobertEarl]

10. You think it is Mossad?

That is an interesting take. Mossad has been known to take drastic measures.

[AntiFascist]

12. No I clearly don't!

I ran across the report and it doesn't seem to come from a legitimate source anyway.

[RogueBandit]

3. Absolutely no evidence

The article has absolutely no evidence to support it's claim. In fact, from the article you link to ...

"Ahlqvist agreed that it's nearly impossible to find out who lies behind attacks like the one that hit Sweden on Monday unless those responsible decide to come forward."

At the beginning, middle and end, the article repeats that Assange activists are behind the attack, but no one offers any evidence.

S4P you find some real loser articles, I must say.

[struggle4progress]

4. Could be. But there was a wave of such attacks against websites in Sweden about a month ago,

for which Assangists took credit, and there was a similar wave against websites in the UK around the same time, for which Assangists also took credit. I should presume the folk, who investigate such matters for the police, collect and maintain some records of various characteristics of the attacks, which might serve as a basis for deciding whether or not several attacks were related

[RobertEarl]

5. Somebody is backing Assange

And we don't know who it is. It could be any number of countries, corporations or the like who want peace to be ended.

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, the only real person who did anything is being ignored. It's almost as if the backers of Assange, want the focus to be on him and nothing else. A focus which we all know is a waste of time.

Who is backing Assange? Who really is pulling the strings?

[AntiFascist]

7. More propaganda...

talk about a conspiracy theory.

[RobertEarl]

9. Beg your pardon?

Is that your final answer?

You think Assange is goody-two-shoes, and that he is not being used by some nefarious hidden supporter? That it is impossible?

Gawd, sometimes I wish I was still so naive.

[AntiFascist]

11. I'm sure Wikileaks has a lot of supporters making donations...

and many of them would be very upset to learn that Assange had a hidden agenda driven by a single supporter. It wouldn't make sense for Assange to operate that way.

On the other hand, some people will say anything to try and demonize him.

[RobertEarl]

13. What has Assange actually done?

Bradley Manning is the only one who has actually done anything of any import.

Maybe you can tell us just what great things Wikileaks has done, cuz I don't see it.

[AntiFascist]

14. Here's the wikipedia description...

If you expect me to be familiar with all of this info, then I'm sorry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya.[14] In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public.[15] In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including around 15,000 that had not been previously published.[16][17] In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[18]

In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic cables in redacted format. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available via Bittorrent for months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to look. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former partner, The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published in February 2011;[19] The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporary (something not possible for a file decryption key).[20] Der Spiegel reported a more complex story[21] involving errors on both sides. The incident led to widely expressed fears that the information released could endanger innocent lives.[22][23]

Maybe you can provide evidence that the diplomatic cables release actually endangered lives? I've read legitimate reports that the release only embarassed the government and nothing more.

[RobertEarl]

17. Right

Mere embarrassment. Don't get me wrong, it hasn't been all bad.

But what concerns me is that knowledge is power. And that since no heads have rolled, it tells me that there is some knowledge being withheld. Why? Maybe for blackmail? Coercion of some sort?

We were told that Wikileaks had some deep-dark secrets. Even Aassange has alluded to that. So why is he holding back?

[AntiFascist]

18. Gee, I don't know...

There's a long list of prominent Republicans calling for his death, maybe that has something to do with it? At the moment he is at Ecuador's mercy, maybe they hold some leverage?

[RobertEarl]

19. You don't know

Fair enough.

So what we are left with is the idea that Assange's future is the most important thing. And the information that is keeping him alive is being held back because were it released heads would roll? It must be some pretty damning evidence.

[riderinthestorm]

20. Meanwhile the Brits are spending more on guarding Assange than #10 Downing St

Link provided by S4P whose no friend of Assange, to put it mildly....

[RobertEarl]

21. That is odd

What are they trying to protect?

If Assange really can spill some beans, and he was taken by the US, he'd spill the beans, right? So why the pursuit? There is something funny going on. Somebody is playing some great games here.

Magicians operate by making you look 'over there' while doing the deed over here. Is Assange just a way to play the magic and keep the opportunity for blackmail alive?

[tama]

27. What are they trying to protect?

It ain't complicated: they are trying to protect big money against freedom of information.

Government secrecy, copyright laws, patent rights, banks, war crimes, corporate crimes, all that garbage.

[AntiFascist]

22. Folks at Stratfor seem pretty pissed off...

I'm in favor of using whatever trumped up charge is available to get this guy and his servers off the streets. And I'd feed that shit head soldier to the first pack of wild dogs I could find.

Or perhaps just do to him whatever the Iranians are doing to our sources there.

This was a quote from one of the leaked Stratfor emails.

[reorg]

15. I think the poster had the following breaking news in mind:

Off His Onion
Breaking News: Julian Assange Mossad Agent!

Iran is a great country for kebab; their pretty if well-covered girls are fine; but sense of humour is just not their forte. Their state media repeatedly broadcasted items lifted from the Onion, a satirical magazine taking them for literal truth. The Onion ran a story about American farmers who would rather have a drink with Ahmadinejad than with Obama, and their Fars news agency duly reprinted it. The Onion faked an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and Iranian state-owned Press TV took it for a real thing.

And now, a new faux-pas. The same Iranian state-owned Press TV published an attack on Julian Assange with a bombastic claim: “Exclusive: Assange-Mossad ties unveiled”. A brief check shows an identical piece appeared on The Veterans Today site. Both pieces are identical, both “exclusive” and both written by the same person, a Gordon Duff, wearing two hats, that of “the chief editor of VT” and that of a “columnist of Press TV”. Oy, it would be better to stick to the Onion.

Not only it is not “exclusive”, there is no “revelation” either. In his column, Duff claims that “Assange, an intelligence asset of Israel, as Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out on December 2, 2010 on National Public Radio in an interview with Judy Woodruff, one tasked with supplying a platform for Israeli intelligence to insert carefully crafted “pointed intelligence” wrapped in “Wikileaks.” A very strong claim! Who would know better than Zbigniew Brzezinski, whether Assange is an intelligence asset or not? If he says so, it is certainly true. But alas, it is not so. In the interview, or anywhere else, or on any other occasion Zbigniew Brzezinski did not say anything similar about Julian Assange.

(...) The centrepiece is the absurd claim that by accusing President Obama of seeking to exploit the Arab spring revolutions for political gain, Assange “supported Romney, just like Netanyahu”. http://is.gd/2DyKtM

Hm, where have I seen this kind of reasoning before

[AntiFascist]

16. It figures....

[struggle4progress]

24. Don't blame me when you choose to post the Iranian government's anti-semitic crap

I haven't ever put anything like that on this website

[freshwest]

29. +1

[riderinthestorm]

8. Meanwhile the Brits are spending $6.4 million/yr keeping Assange on ice. Why????

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2211530/Police-stakeout-Assange-tops-1m-costs-11-000-DAY-ensure-doesnt-flee-Ecuadorian-Embassy.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

[reorg]

23. or maybe it's something else entirely:

Popular torrent hub The Pirate Bay suffered an extended outage on Monday and Tuesday, coinciding with a government raid on its former Web hosting service. The site says it's down mainly because of a power outage, however, and that it will be back later this week.

Users of the infamous digital piracy site began flooding The Pirate Bay's Facebook page early on Monday, complaining that the Sweden-based site wasn't working. Prolonged outages often spook Pirate Bay fans, since the site is firmly in government crosshairs around the world.

It's the most famous nexus of illegal downloads and the embodiment of what anti-infringement legislation like SOPA aims to kill. On a typical day, several million users swap files through the site. When Pirate Bay goes down, a significant chunk of the Internet's piracy infrastructure goes down with it.

Swedish law enforcement agents on Monday raided PRQ, a web host started by two Pirate Bay co-founders, according to reports in TorrentFreak and other news outlets. The raid knocked PRQ and many of the sites it hosts offline, fueling speculation that Pirate Bay was a target of the crackdown. http://is.gd/QDNPOL

[struggle4progress]

25. Anonymous Targets Swedish Sites Over Pirate Bay, Assange

Individuals associated with the Anonymous hacker collective have launched an attack on various Swedish government and banking websites in the name of The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.

In a video (below) posted to YouTube yesterday, organizers pledged to "launch major attacks on several vital portals that represents Swedish society" in the next few days.

The effort, dubbed #OpPRQ #OpPirateBay, will be "the biggest thing ever done in anonymous history," the video boasted. It requested the help of supporters, mostly likely to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

"Free Assange. Free internet. Expect us," the video concluded ...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2410639,00.asp

[tama]

26. Free victims of capitalist greed

[struggle4progress]

28. Swedish Internet sites unreachable after warning from Anonymous

October 6, 2012

Several Swedish government websites could not be accessed Friday after they had received a warning the evening before from a group claiming to be the Anonymous collective, which supports fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Swedish branch of Anonymous denied it was behind the attacks ...

At midday the web sites of the Swedish Central Bank, the intelligence services, the Parliament and the courts could not be reached, AFP determined ...

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-swedish-internet-sites-unreachable-anonymous.html