They’ve been called hackers on steroids, the shadowy hacker network known as Anonymous.
We are seeing a growing cyber threat in the recent attacks launched by Anonymous. The hackers have pulled off some of their most daring attacks yet – targeting the US Government and FBI phone call with Scotland Yard.
Anonymous intercepted an FBI email and gained access to a phone call between the FBI and Scotland Yard which it then posted online. The purpose of this high-level conversation – a discussion on how to combat Internet hacking. Seems Anonymous guys want to prove to the FBI that they are smarter and they want to embarrass the FBI.
This year also the group has shut down government websites in Sweden and Greece, overloading them with traffic. In the US they’ve hacked into police websites in Boston, Syracuse, NY and Salt Lake City.
They also targeted companies like VISA and MasterCard taking down their websites in protest after the credit card giants stopped processing contributions to WikiLeaks.
In May 2012 hacker collective Anonymous has DDoS attacked and taking down The Virgin Media website because as Internet service provider, Virgin Media has denied UK customers access to torrent sharing website The Pirate Bay.
Among other latest attacks is Operation Quebec reacting as they say to extreme aggression during suppression of the peaceful demonstrations arranged by students from Quebec. As a result hacktivists took down the website of Liberal Party of Quebec, Ministry of Public Security of Quebec and some other government and police web site.
One of the problems with Anonymous is you can’t put your arms around it, because there is no organization, there is no leader, there’s no commanders, there’s no lieutenants. There’s no one in charge. And in fact, Anonymous is a loose network of Internet hackers from around the world. That makes it so much more difficult to know what they’re going to do next and much more difficult to stop them.