People are reaching out to the President this week, asking the White House to recognize distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as a form of protest rather than a punishable offense.

DDoS attacks are used to overwhelm a website and knock it offline. They do this by sending lots of traffic to a website’s server, effectively overloading it. The method is often used by “hactivist groups” such as Anonymous, who focus their hacking efforts not on financial gain, but rather on political protest.

The petition states that:

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any “occupy” protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

Not everyone will agree, however. While picket lines and sit-ins discourage people from entering a retailer or business, they doesn’t deny them access wholesale. If a website is knocked offline, then any potential revenue is completely lost, not just scared away.

At the time of writing this post, the petition has 1,438 signatures, and needs 23,562 more in order to reach the necessary 25,000 signature limit to be considered by the White House.

The petition also requests that anyone who has been punished or jailed for DDoS attacks should be “immediately released” and have their records wiped clean of the related offenses.

via Ars Technica; Protester image via Shutterstock

Researchers at Doctor Web found a new trojan app in the Google Play store that can launch distributed denial of service attacks when opened.

Android.DDoS.1.origin, as it’s called, is Russian and disguises itself as the Google Play icon once downloaded. When opened, the app takes its victims to the actual Google Play store so as to distract the user. In the background, however, it searches for its command and control server — and if a connection is made, the app sends the infected phone’s number to the criminals. These hackers then administer commands to the app via text messages.

Commands include launching a DDoS attack or sending other text messages. Doctor Web suggests that the text message function could be used to spam others in the phone’s contact list, prompting them to either download the app or something else the hackers are pushing.

Nowadays when we think of DDoS attacks, we often are reminded of Anonymous, the hacker collective that launches a number of these attacks in the name of political protest. We’ve seen DDoS attacks take down a number of important websites including the CIA’s, financial institutions, and others. These attacks send large amounts of traffic toward a certain website’s servers in an attempt to overload the system and shut it down.

With this app, however, hackers with DDoS intentions are roping in innocent bystanders to do the dirty work. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a campaign like this. In the case of the CIA website’s take down, Anonymous was accused of distributing links on Twitter to low-orbit-ion-canons (LOIC). These “cannons” send thousands of packets of information to a targeted server per second. When the Twitter links were clicked on, unsuspecting visitors would suddenly be roped into the attack.

Doctor Web goes on to say that the app can cause the phone to perform poorly, and can actually run up the owner’s bill by texting premium numbers.

hat tip The Next Web; Android image via Shutterstock, App image via Doctor Web