The cyber protests against President-elect Donald Trump may be starting to unfold with several of his advisers' social media passwords being leaked, a DDoS attack on whitehouse.gov being planned and Anonymous calling for action.
The UK's Channel 4 is claiming it has found passwords belonging to former New York City Mayor, and current Trump cybersecurity adviser, Rudy Guiliani and several other top Trump execs for sale. These are likely the result of the massive hacks on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites that happened several years ago, but were recently revealed.
The leader of the whitehouse.gov DDoS attack is movement is Juan Soberanis. According to Wired, he came up with what may be the digital equivalent clogging the streets of a city with a mass protest. Essentially, asking millions of people to simply visit the White House website on Inauguration Day to overwhelm the servers thus shutting down the site.
This is the same principle used in a criminal DDoS attack, but instead of hijacking thousands of devices to visit a site, Soberanis wants people to just go to the site. Whether or not this particular protest will come off as planned is unknown as the site he set up to gather interested parties is down.
However, a high level of organization may not be needed.
“I imagine that whitehouse.gov will see a spike in traffic on inauguration day from many individuals wishing to protest and from others curious about the results of the protest. I'm not sure there will be enough of a concentrated effort to actually bring down the site,” Amichai Shulman, CTO and co-founder of web security firm Imperva, told SC Media.
The hacker collective Anonymous is also joining the fray. According to NBCNews, it has also put out a call on its Twitter page for its members and followers to find and expose incriminating information on Donald Trump.
