October 4, we ran an article about how the hacktivist collective Anonymous began rumbling that it would proceed with an attack against the New York Stock Exchange in an act of solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) movement. That attack took the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) yesterday at the appointed time of October 10, 3:30pm.

NYSE didn’t blink; stock exchange customers barely noticed.

Bloomberg is reporting that NYSE beefed up security before the purported attack and that only minor delays were reported during the attack. Of course, in the face of a DDoS attack from the number of people that Anonymous can muster, no security will stop it. However, it looks like the attempt didn’t gain enough popular momentum within Anonymous itself to do any real damage.

The anticipated tsunami became a bucket of cold water.

“It’s like four 9-pound weaklings running into a Sumo wrestler,” said E.J. Hilbert, president of Online Intelligence and a former FBI cyber-crime specialist “If you don’t have enough people behind an event like this, it’s just a spike in traffic as far as NYSE is concerned.”

Perhaps revealing the decentralized nature of Anonymous, not every time a cell of the hactivist collective threatens to do something does it actually happen—or, in this case, sometimes it does happen but it’s not popular enough for gather enough supporters to do anything. DDoS attacks depend on a large number of machines all pumping out large amounts of data all pointed at a single target. Lacking the manpower, these attacks will always fall flat.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security issues “warnings” about new attacks from Anonymous against corporations and both the US and UK authorities continue to arrest those involved in previous DDoS attacks.

LulzSec leader Sabu admits to having archives of sensitive information on Chinese servers in Reddit AMA
Much of the mystique of LulzSec died down when UK police announced that they’d arrested their spokesperson, Topiary—however, that did leave their erstwhile leader, Sabu, still in the wind. As a result of the arrests of many of the members of the new defunct hacker group, he has gone underground but still pops up to update his Twitter feed and answer questions.

Recently he appeared on popular social media website Reddit and did an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) thread, The Guardian ran a long-winded article on his answers,

Sabu responds to a number of questions and appears to reveal a number of details about himself, such as that he is married, studied social sciences and English, that his technical hacking skills are self-taught, and that he teaches “sometimes”. He claims to speak three languages – English, Spanish and German – fluently, and to have “decent” Portuguese and Italian. He says he turned towards computer hacking in 2000, when the US government “ignored the peoples’ please to stop bombing Vieques” – a part of Puerto Rico used by the US navy as a bombing range until 2003. He says he likes working on cars, playing music and spending time with his family: “I’m loving life a lot this year. I barely have time for ops [hacker operations] like I used to.”

That confirms other details that have been collected by rival hackers about Sabu which suggest that he is of Puerto Rican extraction, aged about 30 and based in New York.

During the AMA, Sabu claimed to have a cache of e-mails copied from the Sun which are being stored on a Chinese server for safekeeping—along with data from other unmentioned hacks. He’s not releasing them yet, waiting for the proper time to do so. He added that hackers had broken into some banks as well, such as the HSBC (a London bank formed by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) but they dug up no smoking guns yet.

The information taken from the Sun was stolen during a hack by LulzSec where they defaced the front page of the newspaper’s website and added a bogus news article detailing the gruesome death of Rupert Murdoch. The attack was done to show a sense of anger at the suspicious death of News of the World reporter Sean Hoare, whistleblower in a voicemail hacking scandal that affected many of Murdoch’s newspaper properties.