We've just seen the largest cyber attack ever done. As you probably already know Anonymous put down government sites (FBI, Department of Justice) and music industry sites in response to a federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload.
I want to focus here about the methodology used to run the attack.
The attach was run using an application called LOIC ( Low Orbit Ion Cannon) that is specifically designed to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites. Any PC having installed a client of LOIC may be managed from a central user to run a massive attack against a unique target. Basically we could have thousands of users run LOIC generating TCP/UDP/HTTP request towards a website making it unavailable to process anything.
It is not the same as being part of a botnet since in this case we assume that the PC has been infected with a virus or malware in an undetected way. Equipping a PC with a LOIC client is more typically a aware behavior even if it could happen that some people don't realize what they are really doing.
So, how Anonymous managed to create a huge network of LOIC clients available for its purpose ? Here you can find a video that tell you everything about it
