Last Updated on May 24, 2015

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. And this rule worths also for the Infosec Matrix…

Yesterday, while a five-hour outage, due to an alleged DDoS cyber attack initially claimed by the Anonymous, left GoDaddy unable to serve millions of websites (panicking millions of Internet Users), a digital publishing company named BlueToad came forward to take responsibility for the leak of a million iOS unique device identifiers (UDIDs). For sure you will remember that the same infamous collective claimed to have stolen the UDIDs from an FBI laptop few days ago.

Probably the FBI had really nothing to deal with the hack, since yesterday BlueToad admitted (and apologized) to have been breached and that the UDIDs were stolen just in that circumstance.

And as if that was not enough, hour after hour even the alleged cyber attack to GoDaddy has taken a paradoxical turn: after the initial claims, the Anonymous have denied the responsibility for the action (at first marked as the latest form of protest against GoDaddy’s support to SOPA), and have also mocked @AnonymousOwn3r, the alleged author of the attack, who self-proclaimed (sic) “security leader of Anonymous because I’m behind many things such like irc, ops, attacks, and many“.

Now the latest coup de théâtre: there’s no IRC bot behind GoDaddy’s outage (as claimed by the alleged author), but a much less romantic series of (unspecified) internal network events that corrupted data tables, apparently “simple” (for those famliar with networking) routing issues.

And they are two… In the same day, two alleged cyber attack initially claimed by the Anonymous, and then proven to be false. And even if it is not so common to discover two in the same day, fake cyber attacks are becoming quite frequent (think for instance to the alleged hack to Philips, old data leaked in February according to the Dutch Giant, and to Sony). Of course the point are not the Anonymous, the point is that claiming hacks and leaks (made by others, or worst totally false) is becoming too simple… Nowadays with Twitter and Pastebin you can (claim to) hack whatever you want (as an example I often find on pastebin dumps repeated several times and claimed by different authors).

Maybe it is time to take with caution and skepticism the news of massive leaks.