Removing the anonymity from Anonymous

Anonymous, LulzSec and other hacktivists aren't as anonymous as they might think. They're being watched. On this week's Patch Monday podcast, a watcher tells us what he sees. 

Israeli information security researcher Tal Be'ery is the web security research team leader at Imperva's Application Defense Center (ADC), where he leads efforts to capture and analyse hacking data.

Hacktivism is all about public relations, Be'ery said. Hacktivists select targets of opportunity — sometimes even finding a vulnerable site and then adjusting their cause to provide a justification. The hacktivists will try a "real" hack first — a data breach or website defacement — and if that doesn't work, they'll resort to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.