Anonymous is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. A website nominally associated with the group describes it as “an Internet gathering” with “a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives”. The group became known for a series of well-publicized distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.
Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. Anonymous members (known as “Anons”) can be distinguished in public by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks in the style portrayed in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta. However this may not always be the case, as some of the collective prefer to instead cover there face without using the well-known mask as a disguise.
- One of the most famous hacker group and active since 2008 in various protests operations.
- Anonymous’ peak came arguably around 2010 and 2011, when the group launched a massive hacking operation in defense of WikiLeaks called Op Payback
- They made use of Internet for the largest protest via DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] and Defacement with some the tools like
- LOIC: Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is an open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application, written in C#
- Hoic: High-speed multi-threaded HTTP Flood : High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC), is an open-source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application written in BASIC designed to attack as many as 256 URLs at the same time.
- Slowloris : The low bandwidth, yet greedy and poisonous HTTP client!
- Pyloris: PyLoris is a scriptable tool for testing a server’s vulnerability to connection exhaustion denial of service (DoS) attacks.
- Hping: hping is a command-line oriented TCP/IP packet assembler/analyzer.
4. Anonymous has four main goals which unite members. These are…
- anti-cyber-surveillance
- anti-cyber-censorship
- Internet activism
- Internet vigilantism
Interesting Facts Sources about Anonymous
- One of the best source of coverage came from Wired.com Media Coverage on Anonymous Group which publishes current news contents about Anonymous group.
2. Media Coverage from The New York Times
3. Media Coverage from the Guardian
4. From anonews , 10 Things Everyone Should Know About Anonymous
5. BBC Coverage : Anonymous Documentary – How Anonymous Hackers Changed the World Full Documentary
6. Former Motherboard editor Ben Makuch interviewed several Anonymous members, trying to figure out who Anonymous was, and who it has become which documentaried on VICELAND’s new series CYBERWAR
7. Anonymous youtube channel coverage for all recent cyber operations and protests coverage.
8. Site operated by Anonymous Group.
