Explained: Everything you need to know about hacktivist group Anonymous

guest · Jun 8, 2020

Explained: Everything you need to know about hacktivist group Anonymous
The group has been described as a decentralised online collective with no particular political affiliation
June 8, 2020
https://indianexpress.com/article/e...roup-anonymous-george-floyd-protests-6446993/

Who are the Anonymous?
The group has been described as a decentralised online collective with no particular political affiliation, that rallies around causes such as opposing censorship and government control and promoting freedom of speech. In the past, it has expressed support for the Occupy movement and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. The worldwide group is believed to include anyone who wants to join; its members being referred to as ‘anons’.

Anonymous does not use any verified social media handles, with multiple factions using portals such as the ‘AnonNews’ website and Twitter account for disseminating the group’s motives and campaigns.
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Major activities
The movement is believed to have started on imageboard websites such as 4chan in the early 2000s, and first became famous in 2008 when it unleashed cyberattacks on the Church of Scientology [...]
In 2010, Anonymous was believed to be responsible for cyberattacks on Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, after the financial services firms blocked donations to the controversial whistleblower WikiLeaks.

Over the years, the group has targetted child pornography websites and recruiting portals for the Islamic State. It has also gone after government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon in the US and the Scotland Yard in the UK.
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Tactics
Anonymous is known to primarily employ what is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in which hackers swamp a website’s server with data that causes it to crash, making the website inaccessible.
Another tactic that it uses is defacement– when the target website’s pages are replaced with the hacktivists’ messages and graphics.

The group also uses more serious methods such as doxing, in which private or sensitive information is stolen, destroying data using computer viruses, and “phishing” for extracting personal data.
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