American vigilante hacker sends Russia a warning

[meow2u3]

An American vigilante hacker -- who calls himself "The Jester" -- has defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in retaliation for attacks on American targets.

On Friday night, the Jester gained access to the Russian government ministry's website. And he left a message: Stop attacking Americans.

"Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message," he wrote. "Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed."

MID.ru is the official website of the Russian agency that is in charge of maintaining that country's international diplomacy -- equivalent to the U.S. Department of State.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/22/technology/russian-foreign-ministry-hacked/

[tblue37]

1. I wonder when they will track him down and lace his tea with Polonium. nt

[Coyotl]

2. We'll know if he's really an American after he is apprehended.

"Jester" won't be so funny in prison garbs.

[meow2u3]

3. This is his profile - he also hacks terrorist web sites

Meet the vigilante who hacks jihadists

Anonymous isn't doing anything new by hacking Islamic extremist websites. A mysterious figure known as "The Jester" has been at it for five years.

Jester has single-handedly taken down dozens of websites that, he deems, support jihadist propaganda and recruitment efforts. He stopped counting at 179.

To some, he's an Internet superhero. Think Batman, with all the vengeance-laden moral qualms of vigilantism included.

"I realized something needed to be done about online radicalization and 'grooming' of wannabe jihadis, and we didn't have mechanisms to deal with it," Jester said in an interview with CNNMoney. "I decided to start disrupting them."

Little is actually known about Jester, other than his public persona on Twitter as @th3j35t3r: He is unapologetic, unabashedly pro-America and full of military jargon.

He says he operates without the official approval of any U.S. government agency. But while Jester attacks jihadist sites, he says he quietly steals a bunch of information on visitors and site administrators and secretly passes the data on to his contacts at U.S. intelligence agencies.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/16/technology/security/jester-hacker-vigilante/?iid=EL

[ColemanMaskell]

4. Do we know "the Jester" isn't some American Gov't operative being covert/undercover/?

plausible deniability?
If Russia can deny hacking, both sides can play that game?
Just saying - Some parts of the US gov't are capable of orchestrating that - but who knows

[gordianot]

5. Jester may well be nothing more than a legend.

[davidn3600]

6. So wait a minute.....America has hackers?

I thought they were all in Russia or China!

[ColemanMaskell]

7. No, America definitely has hackers, good ones, working for the US gov't.

Rumor is that the Iran nuclear plant was delayed for years by malfunctions caused by malware planted by unspecified western operatives who might have been Israeli or then again who knows. I think they are either CIA or military. Obviously the clowns who couldn't hack an Apple phone aren't among their ranks. But that doesn't mean we don't have any. I'm pretty sure we do.

[davidn3600]

8. I was being sarcastic

All we keep hearing in the news right now is how the evil Russians and Chinese are hacking poor, innocent America. But the reality is that we are likely doing the same kind of things to them and other countries. No one talks about that though.

[ColemanMaskell]

9. You don't expect the gov't to advertise about it. Probably "discourage" media from reporting on it.

If you read newspapers from other countries some of them probably act equally dismayed about US hackers.

I saw Noam Chomsky speak some time back, and he said that he learned several languages as a child growing up in a community where there were immigrants from multiple countries, and that because of this he was able to read newspapers in various languages, and that seemed to be one of the things that had broadened his horizons.

We're generally more limited than he would be, but there are a lot of newspapers in English around the world, so there is some chance to see other viewpoints.

Come to think of it, if anybody here mentions US gov't hackers, they might get a knock on the door from those infamous Men in Black . . . maybe we should just drop this train of conversation

[Dorian Gray]

10. Christ

a hacking war. Just what we need.