December 7, 2010

Anonymous Hackers Join Team Wikileaks!

In an article over atRaw Story.com you can learn about this group, calling themselves Anonymous.

Apparently, they have taken down the website of the bank that froze Wikileak's funds.

RawStory gets one thing wrong-- they say the group is called "Operation Payback." The group is called Anonymous, and they've been around for a while. What they're doing is "Operation Payback." This is interesting, because as far as I know, their protests have in the past been limited to DNS attacks on Scientologist websites, and standing around with Guy Fawkes masks on, evoking V for Vendetta.


From RawStory:

Earlier in the day, Swiss bank PostFinance issued a statement announcing that it had frozen 31,000 euro ($41,000 US) in an account set up as a legal defense fund for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said it had frozen the account because, in opening it, Assange had claimed residency in Geneva.

"Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance," the bank said.

As of Monday evening, the PostFinance website was unavailable.

Operation Payback also promised a hack attack on PayPal, the online payment service that last week cut off WikiLeaks, denying the group a major tool for collecting donations from supporters.


Here's a video Anonymous posted on YouTube about what they are doing.



For more on the Wikileaks story as it unfolds, check out the New York Times blog

Glad to see Anonymous is on Team Wikileaks!



CLICK HERE AND GET YOURS

6 comments:

  1. http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Anonymous

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29

    They actually did real life protest against Scientology, that have been very successful in Australia at least, where the Senate is investigating Scientology for human rights abuses. They also did some protest against the great firewall of Australia and against that muslim group in New York that was giving death threats to the South Park creators. I'm glad they've joined the side of Wikileaks.

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  2. I wouldn't be too happy about this. "Anonymous" is a group of teenagers on 4chan.org who are responsible for many crimes, like terrorist threats to bomb stadiums, child pornography, hacking myspace accounts, and numerous threats to murder people who "betray" them.

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  3. Actually, Anonymous isn't a monolithic or even organized but decentralized group, it's really just individuals and small pockets of people following a very basic premise. And the incidents you bring up are very rare, they've actually done some very impressive activism online, though it doesn't always translate well in real life.

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  4. @Dan

    Most of those incidents are rare and played up by "Fox News" during their embarrassing coverage of anonymous when they coined the internet infamous term "Internet Hate Machine".

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  5. @TR & PA

    They operate mainly out of 4chan.org. If you've ever been to the site's main board, /b/, you'd know what these people enjoy doing. They spread child pornography, threaten people's lives, hack facebook & myspace accounts, and have even been known to threaten to bomb sports stadiums.

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  6. Yeah, I have been there, many times. And I can tell you, such accusations are generally derived from the fox "news" program, which you seem to be parroting.

    Child porn is permabanned there on site. Sometimes it slips through the cracks, but what do you expect with a high traffic open submission site?

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