Anonymous – Who are they?

Anonymous are the entities related to an international network of activities especially, hacking. The group gained notoriety for a series of thoroughly advertised publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on corporate, religious and government websites. It originated as a succession of protests, antics and hacks against the Church of Scientology.

A website associated with the group describes it as [highlight ]”an Internet gathering”[/highlight] with [highlight ]”a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than decree”[/highlight]. The community doesn’t follow a single philosophy, rather each participant have a distinct approach and thoughts about what they do. Some don’t even bother to leave a relic of their ideas, they just do what they have to do. This community is inspired from an unconsolidated Internet association used to be working anonymously and primarily for entertainment.

The only facial identity of them isn’t their actual identity but a [highlight ]Guy Fawkes mask[/highlight], which is a stylish depicted version of Guy Fawkes, a known member of the Gunpowder Plot held in 5th November 1605, London. Anonymous originated in 2003 on image board, which is a type of Internet forum which serves its purpose by posting images.

 

Here are some popular and awesome stunts performed by the community-

 

  • Project Chanology

The hackers crashed the church’s websites and choked their fax machines with black faxes, as well as synchronizing  a routine of attack called “Google bombing”, where the word “Scientology” is connected to other terms such as “dangerous” and “cult”, so that googling “Scientology” would produce alter search results.

 

Projectchanology

                                                                                                                                           courtesy wikipedia.org

 

  • Attack against child pornography

Anonymous took upon this warm-hearted initiative by shutting down 40 illegal child pornographic sites. The group members discovered the cache of such websites, through a guide of classified websites called Hidden Wiki.

 

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  • Cybergate Attack

CEO of the cyber security firm HBGary Federal, Aaron Barr publicly announced that he has the knowledge of some Anonymous members and will soon reveal them, to which the Anonymous retaliated. Firstly, hackers hacked HBGary Federal’s website and replaced the homepage with their logo and a message claiming that Anonymous should not be trifled with. They took down the company’s network, broke into their emails and revealed each of them in an easy access database whose link was shared by Aaron’s twitter account. Some of those emails were highly damaging information like a plan to dismantle Wikileaks.

 

  • Retaliation against FBI

After FBI arrested almost all the employees of file hosting services site Megaupload, the Anonymous retaliated by taking down Recording Industry of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA DoJ website). They even went on successfully hacking the FBI site itself.

 

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Credits : http://hdw.eweb4.com/

 

  • Operation India

The group has come out in support of a civil movement against corruption in India. This cyber movement has been named as ‘Operation India’.

 

[alert type=red ]We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget. We are Anonymous. Expect Us.[/alert]