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Ríodoce, one of the few publications left in Mexico that cover gang-related crime news, suffered a distributed denial of service attack on Friday. The publication's host, DreamHost, told the weekly by email that the attack threatened other customers, so they were being dropped. Their URL, www.riodoce.com.mx, now defaults to a placeholder page.

The publication, located in the city of Culiacán, in Sinaloa state, is one of very few mainstream news publications that still cover cartel-fuelled drug violence and related news. Most publications have been terrorized into silence.

If you ever needed ammunition for your management about getting better network-based defenses for your enterprise, a new study by F5 Networks should help you. Earlier this fall, the company asked 1000 IT managers from around the world about their existing security measures and the cost of various exploits that they have observed over the past year. Strikingly, 100% of them have observed DNS attacks and nearly as many have observed denial of service attacks, both of which are worrisome.

Our original WikiLeaks timeline, including every story we had written about the organization, spanned a period of almost three years, from February 18, 2008 to December 29, 2010. It listed almost 70 posts.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

Yesterday, a YouTube video from a splinter of Hacktivist group Anonymous proclaimed that it will "destroy Facebook" over privacy issues on November 5th. Now, as military tactics goes, that is like telling the Germans that the Allied Forces are going to launch D-Day three months in advance. That is no recipe for success. The threat against Facebook should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, the question arises, if Anonymous or a group of hackers really did want to take down Facebook, how could it be done?

See the video after the jump for a full explanation on why Anonymous might want to destroy Facebook. Yet, the first thing to know about the alleged destruction of Facebook, is that it is not wholly supported by the Anonymous collective. Various Anonymous-based Twitter accounts have said something along the lines of "no one can speak for the whole of Anonymous. There are some anons who support #opFacebook whilst others do not." Yet, what if the entire group was motivated to cause chaos and disruption? Are there any tactical advantages that Anonymous has that Facebook could not easily thwart?

Alleged members of Anonymous arrested. In December of last year, three Dutch teenagers were arrested; in January of this year, British police arrested five alleged members of the hacking collective; another British teen was arrested in June; and now, in the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested 16 people across the country and served 35 search warrants in the course of a series of raids. Those arrests were followed up by that of "Topiary," an alleged Anonymous spokesperson with connection to LulzSec, at his home in Scotland's Shetland Islands.

Those arrested have been charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

The most well-known trick criminal hackers have in their bag is the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. To create a DDoS attack, hackers use a botnet to send mass amounts of traffic at a website server, bringing the site down. Recent attacks targeted CIA's public website, Wordpress and credit card companies. The "hacks" make big news and it seems like almost every other day another large commercial website is taken down.

The most important thing to know about a DDos attack is that it is really not a hack at all. The purpose of DDoS attacks are not to steal information but rather to prove a point. "We control massive botnets and can make life very difficult for you" is the message that hackers are sending. A DDoS is what many would call a "dumb" attack because it is sheer force, a giant hammer aimed at a Web server. Yet, large-scale dumb attacks are often the most difficult to stop. What can companies do to protect themselves against a DDoS attack on their doorstep?

The same week that Freedom House called Iran the world's worst Internet offender, the hacking group Anonymous has begun striking at the country. Officially set to begin on Sunday, some reports indicate the politically-inspired hacking has already commenced, with messages left on several of the websites previously defaced by Iran's government-supported "Cyber Army."

According to the group's press release, the attack officially begins Sunday, May 1 - a labor holiday.

"A new dawn appears to you and your country will be free from the chains of oppression, tyranny and torture. You can finally exhale and take a new breath of air that will fill you with strength, wisdom and freedom."

Long-time blogging platform LiveJournal said today that it has been subject to "repeated, large-scale DDoS attacks" for the past two weeks. The company says that the attacks have targeted a number of different users' journals, some of whom are political in nature. While a small number of users may be targeted, all users lose their ability to publish and read on the platform when the site is taken down. "LiveJournal believes strongly in the ideal of freedom of expression," the company said, "and we're working very hard to ensure that users around the world have a place where their voices can be heard."

Among those affected is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who began blogging on Russian-owned LiveJournal two years ago this month. "As an active LJ user, I believe the hackers' actions to be outrageous and illegal," Medvedev reportedly wrote in Russian on his blog this week. "Both the administration of the blog and law enforcement agencies must look into the matter."

The 4Chan-allied, Wikileaks-defending hacker group Anonymous has apparently launched a distributed denial of service attack against government sites in Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The official Tunisian government site and that of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were both targeted in the North African country. In Zimbabwe, the first lady's website and the official Zimbabwean government site and ministry of finance site were targeted.

Both attacks seem tangentially related to Wikileaks, on whose behalf the group has previously targeted Visa, PayPal and others. In the case of Zimbabwe, Grace Mugabe is suing the Zimbabwean newspaper The Standard for $15 for publishing a cable asserting she is benefiting from illegal diamond sales. Tunisia has blocked access to the primary Wikileaks cable site.

Today the Bank of America reportedly experienced slowdowns based on distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks.

The hactivist group Anonymous, Tweeting as Anony_Ops, announced the attack with the hashtag #OperationBOA.