Hackers have added one more weapon to the arsenal of those fighting against repressive regimes - free software to promote anonymous Web surfing.
Some of the world`s most notorious hackers unveiled a plan this weekend to offer the software in countries where the Internet is censored, especially China and Middle Eastern nations.
An international hacker group calling itself Hactivismo released a program called Camera/Shy that allows Internet users to conceal messages inside photos posted on the Web, bypassing most known police monitoring methods.
In another announcement "Mixter", an internationally known German hacker, said Hactivismo was preparing to launch technology in the coming weeks which, if adopted widely, could allow anyone to create grassroots, anonymous networks where Internet users worldwide could access and share information without a trace.
"(Hackers) are looking for something a little more meaty to work with," spokesman "Oxblood Ruffin" said of the new social activist push by a group formerly known for creating software used by other hackers to attack undefended computers.
The Hactivismo announcement, the result of a two-year project among leading hackers worldwide, was made at H2K2, a three-day conference in New York that ended yesterday. The bi-annual event attracts more than 2 000 security professionals and computer activists, including a significant portion of the hacker elite.
Mixter`s software protocol will apparently allow ordinary computer users to set up a decentralised version of a virtual private network (VPN). VPNs are widely used by governments and companies to create secure networks that are fenced off from the public Internet. "It`s important for anyone, whether they live in a totalitarian country or a Western country, to be anonymous," said Mixter, who lives in Munich.
The Hactivismo software is billed as being able to bypass national firewalls, often implemented by repressive regimes, to limit the quantity and type of information available to their citizens. Hactivismo says its software can defeat these type of controls by making such sites appear innocuous.
The success of the virtual VPN project, however, hinges on wider adoption of the protocol, known as Six/Four, by other software developers. The Hactivismo group hopes to encourage these other developers to embed the protocol in their software.
Six/Four protocol designer Mixter told Reuters that the system was named in honour of the date when Chinese authorities cracked down on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.
Six/Four is designed so that each computer user who uses software running the protocol becomes part of a distributed network, similar to the peer-to-peer sharing network used by applications such as music-sharing programs Napster and Gnutella. With a distributed network design, where each participant acts as a server and there is no central hub, it is very difficult to isolate and close down the network.
"This is going to be a guerrilla information war," Oxblood Ruffin said. "Sites will pop up for a few days and then be taken down." He described a "moving war", in which computer activists react quickly to government efforts to block such programs.
Hactivismo is made up of 40 or so hackers including members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the group behind Back Orifice, which can be used by malicious hackers to gain unauthorised access to unsecured computers running Microsoft`s Windows software.
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