* cyber ethical issues

US Cyber Labs - quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Everyone else does it
If we don’t do it, someone else will do it.
That’s the way it’s always been done.
We’ll wait until the lawyers tell us it’s wrong.
It really doesn’t hurt anyone.
I was following orders.
It’s a gray area.
Some ready made excuses for the cyber security professional’s -boss.

The long promised tool that can be used to hijack tweets was recently released on the Anonymous hacker group’s official blog, complete with download links, source files and how-to instructions.

Even though the infamous cybercriminals claim that the new release is not a hacking tool or an exploit kit, its purpose being “to make it easier for us to tweet faster without copying and pasting constantly,” the functions it performs beg to differ.

URGE, as it’s called, can hijack trending topics of choice, allowing the attacker to tweet messages within them.

The Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter was created by Anonymous because “We recently have become tired of seeing trending topics on twitter that were redundant and ‘pop culture’ like,” revealed one of the members.

They became mad after noticing that Twitter will not trend topics that “actually serve a cause”, only those more appealing to the general public, like those based on TV shows and celebs.

“This was pathetic in our eyes, and we could not stand by and take it anymore,” added the hacker who posted the announcement.

By making use of the recently launched tool, they want to be able to better raise awareness of the real problems of the world.

This apparently harmless application was allegedly made for anyone “who cares to use this for awareness and bashing corrupt politicians,” making people who search for tweets about their favorite artists end up with reading messages about president Obama and armed conflict situations around the world, which in the eyes of the group are more important issues than things like “Jersey Shore.”

The beta version of URGE seems to need Microsoft’s .net Framework 4.0 to function.

Stay tuned as it will be interesting to see Twitter’s response on the matter. Considering that the source code of the application is available, it shouldn’t be too difficult for them to determine the vulnerabilities of the system accessed by the hackers.

uscyberlabs does not condone such behavior and before considering the use of this tool remember that hacking is illegal and you will later suffer legal consequences for your actions.

URGE user manual http://pastebin.com/DGsgHFLQ
URGE source code https://github.com/urge/U.R.G.E