September 15, 2011, 1:26 PM — Hactivist group Anonymous announced it will launch a new weapon on Saturday to replace the Low Orbit Ion Cannon application it uses to automate distributed denial of service attacks.
Rather than just automate content requests to make them faster and easier to launch – so a botnet can launch 10,000 per second rather than 5,000, for example – as the previous application did, the new #Ref#Ref uses a web-site’s own server resources against it, according to hints from various Anonymi.
The group has been testing the new app during the past few weeks, bringing down the main WikiLeaks site, attacking Twitter and running other tests designed to verify the scalability and reliability of the new app.
The app, written in Perl, Python and JavaScript app is designed to max out a web-site’s server not by sending a flood of requests from the outside, but by launching an overwhelming number of processes on the server itself, freezing or bringing it down as its resources are exhausted.
The release of #Ref#Ref is timed to coincide with the combined online/real-world protest against the economic power of Wall Street firms, which it scheduled for 7 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, Sept. 17.
They have their weapons
