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Anonymous have released a new operating system based around Linux which offers a lot of security and sniffing tools. According to reports, more than 30,000 people have downloaded it already. Interestingly however, this appears to have been created by a few members, and the official Anonymous group are distancing themselves from the release.
AnonOps have posted on their twitter page which says that the release is infected.
The operating system isn't hard to find, anyone can snag it from the Source Forge channel, which hosts a variety of open projects. We would like to add however that we haven't tried this ourselves, so there is a chance it could be risky.
The 1.5GB download is formed around Ubuntu code, a great Linux operating system. In a rather clever move, the coders of the Anonymous version have said ‘not to use it to destroy webpages'. They say it can be used for educational purposes and to check the security of web pages.
AnonOps claim the operating system is infected, but the creators of the OS say that is not true and it contains ‘no viruses'.
The BBC report that Rik Ferguson, director of Trend Micro's European security research said it was a “a functional OS with a bunch of pre-installed tools that can be used for things like looking for [database] vulnerabilities or password cracking.”
Sophos senior researcher Graham Cluley said “Who would want to put their trust in a piece of unknown software written by unknown people on a webpage that they don't know is safe or not?”.
We would argue that many people will take the risk on a secondary box of no importance.
Kitguru says: Is this something you would use?
So I get to download an OS from known hackers and botnet users, and I am expected to believe my PC will not be used by anyone else? Thank you 30,000 people for proving stupidity exisits in the most avid of followers!
Well, it’s hard to determine what exactly is Anon-approved and what is not, since anybody can claim to be Anonymous and anybody can gather up a bunch of friends and order them around. As far as we know, this was made by said bunch of friends with the intent of proving the world they’ve got the biggest binary dick.
My view is that there are plenty of websites that offer tools for the download. I don’t need an operating system to do this for me (plus downloading torrents of the mainstream OS is already guaranteed to get you a lot of nice tools).
It could be useful if there were some things in the kernel that could help out but for 1.5 gigs I’m thinking it’s only a lot of software.