12 year-olds to the rescue!

You know the world has gone truly nuts when a serious thing like Wikileaks and the arrest of Julian Assange find themselves defended by a bunch of children that normal spend their days playing first-person shooters online and saying "ROFLL!!!!11111" alot.

And so it was yesterday when lots of kids who had installed LOIC, took it upon themselves to become part of a voluntary-bot net and send lots of traffic at Mastercard's website causing it to be inaccessible for normal everyday users.

Of course, the press has had a field day suggesting that everyone involved is some sort of dark art hacker with immense technical knowledge. No server was it seems, actually compromised, no security was broken.

No. What they did was equivalent to knock down ginger en masse. They rang the doorbell of www.mastercard.com over and over again making sure that www.mastercard.com kept on answering and thus didn't have time to answer the genuine people ringing the doorbell.


This was no "mass hack". It wasn't even a crack. It was a bunch of script kiddies who feel big, clever and important when they follow the point and drool options in a programme they downloaded.

I greatly look forward to some of the arrests that may follow when we see 12 year-olds being raided by the FBI... let's hope they're tossing off to pr0n at the same time just for added embarrassment.