SherWeb

The infamous vigilante hacker group ‘Anonymous’ has become the modern-day Robin Hood of the Internet. Their way of ‘stealing from the rich’ however, is to shut down websites of anyone they see as enemies of their cause (i.e. enemies of freedom of speech and freedom of information).

The ‘collective super-consciousness’ as they are referred to, do not have a leader or operate under any hierarchy. They aren’t even necessarily hackers. Many Anonymous members believe in a cause and volunteer their computers to help bring down websites.

Anonymous first garnered national attention when they took on the Church of Scientology, shutting down their website then protesting in Guy Fawkes masks outside their headquarters. Anonymous has continued to strike new targets.

Here are some of the recent major websites that have suffered the wrath of Anonymous.

PostFinance, Bank of America, PayPal, eBay, MasterCard, Visa

When: December 2010
Motivation: Messing with WikiLeaks

Image Source: Servant of Chaos

On Sunday November 28, WikiLeaks began releasing the first of its 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. One by one, huge institutions began to systematically shut down any aid that supported the WikiLeaks movement. PayPal, (owned by eBay) permanently restricted all accounts used by WikiLeaks. PostFinance (a Swiss Bank) froze money that belonged to WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Major credit card companies including Mastercard and Visa withdrew people’s ability to make donations to WikiLeaks.

Websites of organizations trying to knock WikiLeaks offline and cut off WikiLeaks’ funding soon felt the wrath of Anonymous. Following the arrest of Assange, Anonymous unleashed their private LOIC botnet (Low Orbit Ion Cannons, a fictional weapon in the Command & Conquer video game series) to cause distributed denial of service (DDoS ) attacks on these critical websites.

Anonymous also released Bank of America e-mails in which a former employee details plans to delete sensitive documents. The Bank of America website also suffered periodic downtime due to floods of DDoS attacks from Anonymous.

Westboro Baptist Church

When: February 19, 2011
Motivation: Payback

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church take an extreme stance against homosexuality and are known for their erratic and controversial displays, like picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and most recently, threatening to picket the death of nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, killed in the Tucson shootings.

On February 19, 2011, the Westboro Baptist Chrurch announced that Anonymous wrote an open letter to the church,that basically told them to “Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites.”

The Westboro Baptist Church tweeted “Thanks, Anonymous! Your efforts to shut up God’s word only serve to publish it further. God did that! Our response to you? Bring it, cowards”

The media picked up the story immediately however the next day, Anonymous posted an open letter on their own forum AnonNews which stated that the threat was not even sent by Anonymous. They even purported to the church doing this as a publicity stunt.

But now that the church had put Anonymous up to the challenge, they had something in store for them. While the church’s spokesperson, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was on a live radio interview on The David Pakman Show, someone from Anonymous called in to say that the letter was not in fact real. The caller then proceeded to hack a Westboro Baptist Church-owned website during the interview.

BMI.com

When: March 2011
Motivation: Intellectual freedom and fair copyright laws

Broadcast Music International, BMI.com, was shut down by Anonymous in “Operation Payback”. This was actually the second time in the group’s history where it targeted the film and music industry. A year prior, Anonymous temporarily shut down the websites for the Recording Industry Association of America, the U.S. Copyright Office, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Members of the “/b/” bulletin board at 4chan.org, launched a DDoS attack on BMI.com, saying “Legislation serves to protect artists not the companies managing them and should never attempt to prevent the spread of creativity to the general public.”

HBGary

When: February 6, 2011
Motivation: Revenge

A note left at HBGary’s tradeshow booth by Anonymous at an RSA security conference

HBGary, positioned itself as an ‘expert’ in computer security. But Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm , made a move that eventually cost him his job. Barr told the Financial Times that he knew and planned to expose the identities of ‘leaders’ behind the Anonymous collective.

His plan backfired brutally. Anonymous broke into HBGary’s servers, exposed 71,800 company emails, destroyed the company’s internal data and defaced the website. Breaking into the security website was easy because the CEO used the same weak password for e-mail, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn etc.

The Anonymous group detailed publicly how it exploited weak passwords and unpatched servers to crack the network. After the humiliating episode, Barr stepped down from his position as CEO.

An important lesson in security: make sure that whatever corporate or personal email system you use, whether its Gmail or Outlook on a hosted Exchange platform, that you test the password strength and use different passwords for different accounts!

Koch Industries

When: February 28, 2011
Motivation: Messing with democracy

Image Source: Chattahbox

Don’t mix politics and business. Anonymous took action against billionaire owners of Koch industries, David and Charles Koch. The brothers are known for being prominent backers of the Tea Party movement. They were also funding the Americans for Prosperity website, a conservative organization, which among many right-wing ideals, supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposed bill to remove the labour unions’ right to negotiate with the state. This would make it illegal for state-paid workers to negotiate terms with the state as a consolidated group.

Anonymous decided to step in. The hacker group discovered a clause in the proposed bill that would allow companies like Koch Industries to purchase publicly owned utility plants.So, they attacked the Domain Name System (DNS) on the Americans for Prosperity’s website causing it to be intermittently unavailable.

Tunisian Government

When: December 2010-January 2011
Motivation: Freedom of speech and information

Known as ‘Operation Tunisia’ a reported 9000 Anonymous members participated in a series of DDoS attacks launched against sites belonging to the Tunisian government, the Ministry of Industry and the Tunisian Stock Exchange, among others.

The top five government websites in Tunisia were knocked offline for a substantial amount of time once the inundation of DDoS attacks started. Anonymous also provided important documents designated ‘Operation Leakspin’ to overcome government censorship via proxies. This was a vital key that helped take down the incumbent government.

Egyptian Government Website

When: December
Motivation: Freedom of speech and information

In ‘Operation Egypt’, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against Egyptian government websites managing to keep them offline until then-Prime Minister, Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Participants who contribute to the computer attacks should be aware that they are taking risks. It is illegal to mount a DDoS attack and the LOIC botnet does leave traces that authorities can track back to users.Nevertheless, Anonymous has been able to successfully bring down the systems of some of the world’s biggest institutions and has shown time and time again tha they are a force to be reckoned with.

As their war cry goes:

They are Legion.
They do not forgive.
They do not forget.
Expect them.

Check out our awesome Infographic on Anonymous’ most notorious hactivism feats