Anonymous

Your typical Anonymous member.

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Anonymous is the moniker used by a loose collective of script kiddies and ne'er-do-wells associated with the imageboard 4chan, Encyclopædia Dramatica, and various other forums since 2003. While generally anarchic, Anonymous has collaborated in several high-profile acts of digital protest and vigilantism; this came to a head in the national media during the international controversy surrounding WikiLeaks' release of US State Department secret cables, though since 2008, Anonymous had been engaged in a guerrilla campaign against organizations like the Church of Scientology.

"Anonymous" is not a defined group of people, but rather a name used by any "hacktivist" if they believe their goals align with the loosely defined interests of Anonymous.^{[note 2]} Thus, contrary to some descriptions of it as a hive mind or a child of cyberspace, Anonymous is not much different from other examples of leaderless resistance in the past, or flash mobs in the present. What Anonymous does can vary very widely in its qualities, along with the mentalities of those who use the name.

Broader movement[edit]

The most common use of "hacking" by Anonymous is in fact a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack; an attack of this nature is the real world equivalent of having a group of people loiter in front of a door preventing anyone from entering (which ironically enough they would end up doing literally in their Habbo Hotel raids).^{[note 3]} Their other primary method of attack is to gather and distribute personal information on targets to spur mass-harassment via threatening phone calls, fake pizza deliveries, black faxes, SWATting, etc. Such tactics give Anonymous the image of being vandals and make it really easy for the general public to dismiss what they say.

The second annual Million Mask March in Edinburgh, Scotland

The anti-Scientology effort "Project Chanology" made Anonymous more known and led to growth and branching into political activism, perhaps most visible in the "Million Mask March" held each year on November 5 to coincide with Guy Fawkes' Night. Their collective engagement can in practice end up seeming to be about everything and nothing, as there is no clear overarching aim. For example, the demonstration of 2013 was held in over 400 cities^[2] and was heavily touted by Anonymous supporters as a global revolution and awakening. However, participants generally seemed to number in the dozens and hundreds, and it pretty much amounted to what Anonymous does online—which didn't exactly translate well into face-to-face interaction.^{[note 4]} The prevalence of cranks, conspiracy theorists and PR coverage courtesy of such paragons of independent media like RT add further to the whole spectacle being more hot air than anything. Another "operation" by some Anonymous groups, known as the "Worldwide Wave of Action" (April 4, 2014) shaped up to be essentially more of the same but with fewer people and less media, presenting itself as a continuation of OWS with a kitchen-sink of utopianism and crankery.

In other words, their major method of operation is to do something that seems really "horrifying," but in reality is pretty much a waste of everyone's time.^{[note 5]}

Conspiracy theorists[edit]

Many members of Anonymous believe conspiracy theories, like the Illuminati ones (or just enjoy trolling people with them); they like to show it to us in their videos.^{[note 6]} By the very nature of the collective, and unlike Occupy Wall Street (OWS), it is difficult to know whether they're just trolling people, seriously condoning nonsense, or both at the same time. And regarding who the Anonymous "they" are, all you really need to do is buy a Guy Fawkes mask, and you pretty much look like an Anonymous member.

Another well-known group growing out of 4chan beginning in 2017 is QAnon, the alt-right conspirituality movement which agitated for a Trump-led revolution and "cleansing" of the "evil satanic elements" in charge of the U.S. Anonymous has denounced QAnon and Pizzagate, and accused them of being created by state-backed actors and Trump supporters with knowledge of Anonymous's workings to discredit their operations.^[4]

Anonymous' activities[edit]

If we wanted to assign a particular moral spectrum to the organization, it would have to be a blue and orange one. Their spawning point, and usually the place they'll spend most of their time is the /b/ (random) board on 4chan, which most people who frequent 4chan will attest actually says a lot about who you're dealing with. And yet, while they'll gleefully DDoS and hack sites and organizations just for lulz, they do sometimes take on some things most people would consider good.

Their usual methods of operation include:

• DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), essentially flooding a computer or site with outside connections and making it to where no one can reach it (think of it like a bunch of copy-paste robots lengthening the lines at the DMV exponentially). 90% of their "hacks" involve this for the most part, and almost none of the DDoSers do it without programs such as "Low-Orbit Ion Cannon," making their "hacker organization" little more than a bunch of script kiddies thinking they're "1337 h4xx0r5."
• Doxxing, releasing personal information about a person or persons, allowing people to order pizza and porn in their name.
• Black Faxing, in which they just send faxes with nothing more than black characters filling up the page, both to waste paper and ink, and to jam up the fax machine for days.
• Actual hacking. Don't get us wrong, they rarely do this (and even then, it's usually their "senior" members, such as LulzSec back when it still operated), but these occasionally turn up. They tracked people who bought child porn on Silk Road by messing with their Tor clients to bug a certain IP, they used SQL injection among other things to take over HBGary's databases, and they have brute-forced their way into numerous DAESH social media accounts (in addition to the times they took over the WBC and KKK's accounts).

Some of their more well-known activities include:

• Project Chanology, their ongoing protests against the Church of Scientology.
• Occupy Wall Street, an event they had a heavy hand in publicizing and carrying out.
• Habbo Hotel raids, one of their earliest "raids," where they sat in front of the virtual hotel's pool to trap people in, and formed swastika formations. This was before they had really formed a separate identity from 4chan (it wasn't until Project Chanology that the two began to diverge).^[5]
• A feud with Westboro Baptist Church, resulting in one of the lulziest moments in the history of the "church," where Shirley Phelps-Roper proclaimed on the air that there was nothing they could do to silence the "words of God", followed immediately by all of Westboro Baptists' sites all being taken offline for several days. This feud was renewed in the wake of the Sandy Hook and Boston Marathon attacks.^[6]
• In 2008, circumstantial evidence pointed to Anonymous attacking an Epilepsy Foundation discussion board with intent to cause seizures by flashing gifs.^[7] Self-proclaimed Anonymous co-founder^{[note 1]} Aubrey Cottle finally admitted in 2021 that it really was Anonymous that did this but that it was misguided and wrong.^[1]
• The 2011 HBGary raid (though this was mainly performed by LulzSec, a subgroup of "senior" Anon members with actual hacking skills).^[8]
• The 2011 Operation Darknet, resulting in the takedown of a large child pornography site, and the arrests of hundreds of purchasers of said porn.^[9]
• The 2011 PlayStation Network outage, which they denied for a while, before finally taking credit in the wake of the 2014 PSN outage perpetrated by Lizard_Squad.^[10]
• Operation Payback, a retaliatory attack on credit-card companies that refused to service accounts belonging to Wikileaks.
• Operation Ferguson, in which Ferguson, Missouri Police Chief Jon Belmar was doxxed in retaliation for the August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.
• The Steubenville rape case, in which they doxxed the football players responsible as well as several police officers that they believed to have covered up the scandal.
• The 2014-15 hacking of the Ku Klux Klan America twitter feed, resulting in the doxxing of several members of the organization's senior staff.
• In 2016, Anonymous participated in attacks against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
• After a four-year period of inactivity, Internet users claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous came out in support of the 2020 George Floyd Protests and hacked the Minneapolis and Buffalo Police Department websites.^[11] However, doubt has been raised on whether hackers are truly affiliated and the attacks themselves have been noted to be rather crude.
• On May 31, 2020, a person or group claiming to be part of Anonymous published a series of tweets and posted to a Scribd account alleging numerous serious crimes against an array of people, such as claiming to have receipts of Donald Trump participating in child molestation with Jeffrey Epstein and Princess Diana being murdered for discovering the British Royal Family's involvement in sex trafficking.^[12] These posts were deleted, although screenshots were saved by Internet users.
• Operation EpikFail, an attack on the far right hosting provider Epik (having serviced websites like 8chan and The Daily Stormer in the past) was revealed on September 13^th 2021, releasing all information associated with the company, including credit card details and numerous subpoenas the registrar had been served by the US Federal Government.^[13] The contents of the hack would be released the following day.^[14] On September 29^th, Anonymous released the "/b/ sides" to the hack, containing a full dump of Epik's server.^[15] Then on October 4^th came a third part, "You Lost The Game", with a dump of Texas GOP data.^[16] In total, the hack has been characterized as "[...]the biggest domain-related hack I've ever seen[...]" by a researcher from the Washington Post.^[14]

See also[edit]

• Encyclopaedia Dramatica
• Barrett Brown

External links[edit]

• Fox11 'investigates' Anonymous, doing it wrong!
• Rick Mercer Report on Anonymous
• See the Wikipedia article on Timeline of events associated with Anonymous. — a more complete timeline

Notes[edit]

References[edit]