Anonymous
January 3, 2012 in World
I’ve been keeping an eye on the activities of Anonymous for a while. They are clever revolutionaries that fight their battles through hacking computers.
If you aren’t familiar with them, I’ll give you a little background. No one knows who they are because Anonymous is well, anonymous. They wear masks in their videos. They use computerized voices.
They are loosely based on Guy Fawkes, who was tortured and executed in the 1600s for being a British revolutionary, and a movie loosely based on Mr. Fawkes, called V for Vendetta, where the main character, a revolutionary in a future Great Britain, wears a Fawkes mask.
They have produced a series of YouTube videos in which they encourage revolutionary acts and announce their plans to take down government, large corporations, and organized crime.
Their list of opponents include Facebook, Scientology, the Mexican Drug Cartel known as The Zetas, and, more recently, Sony, Stratfor, and the New York Times.
Stratfor is a US-based security think tank. They provide security consulting for Apple Computers and the United States Department of Defense. However, they didn’t practice what they preached and Anonymous hackers easily accessed a customer database, including credit card information.
Last week, they claimed they sent an email to eight million New York Times’ subscribers. The newspaper says the email was supposed to go to only three hundred subscribers and an employee made a mistake.
However, Anonymous says they hacked the servers and sent the email. As evidence, they point out that the email wasn’t on New York Times letterhead or formatted like the emails the Times normally sends.
As I reviewed the story, I found a couple of Twitter accounts mentioned in the article and decided to follow them so I could keep an eye on other Anonymous claims.
This is where the story gets interesting.
As I glanced over one of the Twitter feeds, I saw a link that said, “Just realised a tweet from a few days ago didn’t send. Enjo hundreds of German CC’s courtesy of our Piggy Bank:”
I clicked on the link to see if this was a joke.
It wasn’t.
Much to my surprise, a list of almost three thousand credit cards appeared on my screen with the number, expiration date, security code, name, address, and zip code.
Most, but not all, of the cards were expired.
I’m an honest person so I didn’t do anything with the info. Therefore, I don’t know if the list was real or not.
As I looked further down the Twitter feed, I read that it was a list of every credit card used through a certain German bank in 2011.
Anonymous claims this is just the tip of the iceberg.
They have released other information and they promise to release more. Anyone they decide is an enemy can expect their personal information from Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other sites, including dating sites, to show up on the internet accessible by anyone.
It appears they intend to fight this revolution differently. One of their techniques is to release as much information as possible. This may include your personal and financial information.
What’s the peaceful response?
I’ll write about that tomorrow.
