Arstechnica goes hands-on with Anonymous-OS and finds nothing special

Arstechnica has gone through the trouble of testing Anonymous-OS - a live bootable Linux distribution which the “official” Anonymous group has denied having any affiliation with.

The package which was originally posted on Sourceforge on March 13th, received just over 20,000 downloads before it was taken down yesterday. Sourceforge took the project down after finding that it was “a security related operating system, with, perhaps, an attack oriented emphasis” the company said in a statement. The @anonops Twitter account yesterday also cautioned that the project could possibly contain trojanized software or maybe was some sort of trap by law enforcement.

So what's actually in the package? Not much according to Ars. The OS is nothing but a repackaged Ubuntu distribution (as expected) with a couple “anonymous related” hacking tools including LOIC, HOIC, Slowloris and Pyloris plus other widely available open source tools (or at least the links to them). They also didn't find any strange or suspicious activity after looking at the processes running and from sniffing the network connection traffic using Wireshark. Looks like 20,000 people just wasted a whole bunch of bandwidth!