Raids target computers suspected in ‘Anonymous’ cyber-attack

Posted by Brock Brooke on November 30, 2011. - No Comments

NORMANDY • The sound of keys in his lock and the jangling of the security chain on his door awakened Chris Sudlik.

It was 6 a.m. July 19, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis student had fallen asleep just a few minutes before.

At his door were FBI agents and police who suspected him of being a member of the “Anonymous” hacker group — thought to have brought down a business website with a flood of attacks.

“It was pretty terrifying,” Sudlik told a reporter in a recent interview. While “they didn’t quite kick down the door,” he said, he was forced to the floor after he let the officers into his ground-floor apartment on Marietta Drive, just east of the university.

The officials forced his fiancée to wait outside as he was questioned, and agents grabbed and carted away computers, CDs and other equipment.

“They said I had evidence that I was part of some DDoS attack,” he said, referring to what’s known as a “distributed denial of service.” It is when computers are used to overwhelm a website with page requests.

The search of Sudlik’s apartment was one of 12 raids in mid-July related to an attack on Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kan., according to recently unsealed court documents. Dozens more targeting the “hactivist” group have gone on this year, according to media reports, and more than a dozen alleged hackers were arrested in a separate case in July, accused of attacking PayPal.

Anonymous is a leaderless group that “relies on the collective power of individual participants,” Gordon M. Snow, assistant director for the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in remarks before Congress in April. “Its members utilize the Internet to communicate, advertise and coordinate their actions.”

The FBI says the group has launched DDoS attacks against various businesses, individuals or organizations for perceived wrongs. It also is said to have hacked into the emails and files of a government contractor whose employee had boasted of identifying its members.

More recently, the group has either claimed credit for, or been blamed for, threatening to shut down the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, attacking the county website of a Texas judge featured in a viral video physically disciplining his daughter, and busting a child porn ring.

Court documents show that a computer linked to Sudlik was supposedly on a list of machines that attacked Koch websites, including toilet paper brands Angel Soft and Quilted Northern, on Feb. 27, Feb. 28 and March 1.

Neither Sudlik nor anyone else has been charged with any crime in the Koch case. He denies having any role in it.

Koch was targeted, according to a press release from Anonymous, because of owners David and Charles Koch’s attempts to “usurp American Democracy.” The final straw, the Feb. 25 statement says, was the Kochs’ involvement in attempts to eliminate collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin workers.

Virginia Bauer, 83, described the arrival of 10 FBI agents and local police at her house in Sebastian, Fla., at 7 a.m. July 19.

“They’re out there screaming, ‘Someone in this house has committed a federal crime,’” she recalled. “I felt very … violated. The way they went through everything. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without someone guarding me.”

Bauer’s grandson, who is in high school, later told her that he and a friend had an online conversation about Koch.

“Whoever was online said the Koch brothers were cheating people. They didn’t hack into anything,” she said. “They just pushed a button that, what does it do? It ties it up for while. It crashes them.”

Clifford Neuman, a computer security expert and director of the University of Southern California Center for Computer Systems Security, said he does not believe authorities are targeting small players in Anonymous attacks.

“I’m not aware of them going after the one person who clicks the button — the small actor,” said Neuman, He added that any one person would have little effect on a website.

Although Neuman cautioned that he has not been tracking the specifics of investigations, he speculated that agents may be looking for evidence on seized computers that could lead to those who coordinated the attacks.

Sudlik said he had advocated a boycott of the company — not an attack — and suspects he was targeted for being in a chat room in which both boycotts and attacks were discussed.

He called the documents that supported the search “relatively accurate but very misleading.” He said an attack is temporary and causes little damage, based on the research that he has done since the raid, certainly not rising to the level of a felony. “If there’s damage, it’s only lost business. How much business does a toilet paper site get at 3 in the morning?”

Since the raid, agents have refused to return an expensive computer, Sudlik complained. “It took me months to even find out who I needed to be talking to.”

A reporter’s call to Special Agent Richard Anderson in the Kansas City office of the FBI was returned by spokeswoman Bridget Patton, who would only say, “Based on the fact that it is an ongoing investigation, we would not be at liberty to make any additional comments.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas, which documents show is running the investigation, declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the St. Louis office of the FBI.

Sudlik said the loss of his computers ruined a planned sale of an invention. Without money to replace them, he has been forced to buy parts to repair old computers he had lying around.

Federal court records show that no one in the nationwide raid has been charged or has sued to recover equipment.

Sudlik suspects the others probably are “as poor as I am.”

Since the raid, Sudlik said, “basically, I’m just constantly afraid that the FBI is going to come knocking on my door and arrest me for something.”

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