The Anonymous DDOS: A Tool of Last Resort?
The Anonymous group appears to be most effective when launching a distributed denial of service attack, even though that doesn't appear to be its preferred strategy.
Analyst group Imperva issued a report on Monday that breaks down a 2011 attack by the group, which the New York Times reported was a coordinated attack on the Vatican over several days. According to the report, the Anonymous group - as per the name, a collection of anonymous users - was made up of of ten to fifteen core hackers, with "genuine hacking experience and are quite savvy," according to Imperva. The remainder were a large group of a few dozen to a few hundred volunteers, Imperva said.
The attack, according to Imperva, followed three stages over the course of about 25 days. During the first 18 days, the group drummed up support, posting YouTube videos and soliciting support via the group's Twitter accounts. During the second phase, lasting four days or so, the core of the group sniffed around, using hacking tools to search for and try to exploit vulnerabilities in the applications used by the site, said to be an e-commerce site used by the Vatican to promote World Youth Day. Tools used included the Havij scanner and Acunetix, a Web vulnerability scanner.
