Gene Simmons Directly Threatens Anonymous With Legal Action, Jail Time
October 17, 2010
Thomas Mennecke
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Gene Simmons, frontman of the band KISS, is hardly impressed with the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on GeneSimmons.com - and indirectly - SimmonsRecords.com. In fact, according to a news post made to his site yesterday, Gene is threatening legal action against the perpetrators, along with posting their names and pictures online. Here's the post as it appeared yesterday:
Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers.
Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say "adventurous" young people, who feel they are above the law.
And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.
First, they will be punished.
Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who's been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.
We will soon be printing their names and pictures.
We will find you.
You cannot hide.
Stay tuned
First to clarify, the attack on GeneSimmons.com wasn't exactly a "hack" - rather it was a DDoS attack. In order for this type of attack to work, many computers have to connect simultaneously to the target website and barrage it with traffic (packets). If enough computers are part of the attack, the web server becomes overwhelmed and unresponsive. The attack on GeneSimmons.com was partially successful, taking the site offline intermittently until the attack ceased.
Proving those responsible behind a DDoS attack is difficult, if not impossible. The first step in their investigation is to gather the IP addresses that connected during the attack, and attempt to discern those taking part in the attack from those merely visiting. Additionally, it's possible that many of those taking part of a DoS attack have no knowledge they're even taking part of the attack, especially if botnets were utilized. Botnets are drone networks of computers taken over by the originating perpetrator, and put to work by continuously pinging the target web server. The goal of the investigation would be to find those originating the attack - a daunting task considering many members of Anonymous uses encryption and proxy servers to hide their identity.
The cyber wars continue, as the Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom was attacked by Anonymous yesterday. As of this writing, the site remains offline.
Update: Anonymous has caught wind of Gene Simmons' recent comments (see above) and have made GeneSimmons.com and SimmonsRecords.com an official target. As of this writing both sites are down.
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O.K. Vinnie, stop messing with Gene.
