Anonymous OS

After reading a few news articles about Anonymous OS, a new Operating System supposedly developed by the Hacktivist group Anonymous, I thought I would write an opinion piece on the matter.

First off let's cover a few basics.  The OS is not developed by Anonymous - at least not in an "official" sense.  That in itself is a massive can of worms as Anonymous is a movement and therefore can't really be seen to have any centralised control.  Despite that however they do have some degree of mutually agreed structure.  There's an important distinction that needs to be drawn here between the true Activists and the sympathisers / fan-boys.  The Activists are the founders of the movement the patriarchs of the Anonymous Cult if you will.  They will express a certain degree of control and are by no means stupid.  These people are educated in their field, whether that be formal or self-taught these are people who can run rings around anyone.  These are the people responsible for the initial ideology behind Anonymous and they are the people who run a few Anonymous "Outlets" that make "Official" announcements and claim responsibility after key events occur.  In the case of Anonymous OS, a number of these Outlets have publicly denied that the Operating System was developed by Anonymous.

Does that mean that "Anonymous" the movement did not develop this OS?  No.  It means nothing.  As I said above Anonymous is a movement and any attempt at centralised control is futile.  Those that originally founded the Anonymous movement cannot possibly be ignorant of this - why else would they have created their public outlets and chose to pass comment at all on these issues.  The reason is because as a movement, as the collective grows so too must the level of anarchy and insubordination.  Rifts and internal conflicts will inevitably ensue and fractions will break away and new movements started.

This is where Anonymous OS comes into play.  Anonymous OS is an Operating System built upon Linux that gathers together a lot of tools that in essence can be used for hacking, although not marketed in those exact words, that is its purpose.  If you are wondering why someone did not have the bright idea to call it Anonym-OS or something with similar word play, the answer is that that OS already exists.  Anonym.OS is a BSD based Operating System.

Is Anonymous OS illegal?  Technically no.  This comes down to the analogy of the knife manufacturer vs the knife wielding maniac - that is to say, knives are not illegal, they are very useful, they have many different uses, in the hands of a surgeon a knife can save lives, but a knife can be misused and used to harm or in the extreme, kill.  Does that mean knives should be banned from shops? No.  Does it mean that knives are illegal? No.  Anonymous OS although a very powerful knife in the wrong hands is still just a knife.

This is not the first Linux distribution that has been built to use these tools among others.  There are some such as DEFT Linux - Digital Evidence and Forensics Tool-kit Linux, which is used by Police forces and various corporations for, as the name suggests, Digital Forensics.  Some of its more useful features is the ability to analyse a formatted hard drive and recover files and folders even after they were deleted.  DEFT again includes some of the utilities that are included in Anonymous OS, tools that can be used for Network Analysis, Packet Sniffing etc.

Should you install Anonymous OS?  That is not an easy question to answer.  I personally have not yet installed it and I doubt I will.  A number of Security companies have stated the OS as containing viruses - and before you chime in with your mantra of Open Source being Virus immune that is not the case.  There is absolutely nothing in Linux that prevents for example a keylogger from recording every keystroke, you do not need root privileges to be able to listen to the keyboard for input.  Stick one inside something simple like one of the many free Games, one that allows network play and you will have access to the internet to be able to send the collected data to an online database.  The belief that Open Source is virus free relies on one assertion - that the User will read the code of the source and verify it is safe - or that they "trust" that someone else "trustworthy" has read the source and said it was safe.  The more mainstream Linux becomes the less technically minded the average Linux user will be and the less likely they are to ever read the source code.

The conclusion is simply that if you want to try Anonymous OS go ahead but I would advise you only do so if you know a bit about Linux and you can actually understand C/C++ source code.  If you install it and it turns out it is riddled with viruses then I have no sympathy for you whatsoever.