Over the years internet hacking has become more and more popular for tech savvy users on social media. This coupled with the fact that the tools used for hacking are easily accessible and easy to use create a recipe for disaster, at least for big companies that got in the way of a group known as Anonymous. Anonymous is an internet hacking group or hacktivist group depending on how one would look at it. They are best known for their attacks on the Church of Scientology, Westboro Baptist Church, and their affiliation with wikileaks. The attacks done by this group have been so widely recognized that they were even covered on multiple news outlets such as FOX and the BBC. Heralded as heroes by users of the image board 4chan and ridiculed as “an
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The group Anonymous started in 2003 on an image sharing board known as 4chan. The group was named so after the “forced_anon protocol” a procedure on the site to sign every post as anonymous (Olson 36). Large groups of users from this site started performing “raids” on other websites. One of the most famous are the Habbo Hotel raids from 2003-2007 in which a large group of users would dress up as a black man with a large afro and block the pool saying “Sorry pool closed due to fail and AIDS” (Olson 49). Anonymous however, really started making an impact in 2008 with their “Project Chanology”. An event, which started with a scientology video of Tom Cruise laughing hysterically being leaked onto the video sharing site YouTube on January (Infosec 2011). After the video was uploaded and removed from a number of different websites and the Church of …show more content…
Starting from the small website known as 4chan Anonymous grew into something much larger. Showing no leaders or any real members the group lived up to its name. The group used simplistic ways to attack but the simplicity was not the reason the attacks were so effective but rather the sheer volume of people who partook in each attack. Being able to gather on a whim and produce such a largescale attack more than once is impressive to say the least. Anonymous also fights for good, in theory at least, fighting to prevent censorship and the abuse of power. This can go more than overboard though as most of the attacks made by anonymous ended up being rather extreme and compromising innocent users’ security to get a message out to a large corporation. In a way this is the most effective way as it forces the company in question to act to prevent a reputation from being sullied but there are still better ways to get the message across. Anonymous as a whole really shows to be no more a threat as a large scale operation has not occurred since 2011, making it borderline inactive if not considered so
The group Anonymous started in 2003 on an image sharing board known as 4chan. The group was named so after the “forced_anon protocol” a procedure on the site to sign every post as anonymous (Olson 36). Large groups of users from this site started performing “raids” on other websites. One of the most famous are the Habbo Hotel raids from 2003-2007 in which a large group of users would dress up as a black man with a large afro and block the pool saying “Sorry pool closed due to fail and AIDS” (Olson 49). Anonymous however, really started making an impact in 2008 with their “Project Chanology”. An event, which started with a scientology video of Tom Cruise laughing hysterically being leaked onto the video sharing site YouTube on January (Infosec 2011). After the video was uploaded and removed from a number of different websites and the Church of …show more content…
Starting from the small website known as 4chan Anonymous grew into something much larger. Showing no leaders or any real members the group lived up to its name. The group used simplistic ways to attack but the simplicity was not the reason the attacks were so effective but rather the sheer volume of people who partook in each attack. Being able to gather on a whim and produce such a largescale attack more than once is impressive to say the least. Anonymous also fights for good, in theory at least, fighting to prevent censorship and the abuse of power. This can go more than overboard though as most of the attacks made by anonymous ended up being rather extreme and compromising innocent users’ security to get a message out to a large corporation. In a way this is the most effective way as it forces the company in question to act to prevent a reputation from being sullied but there are still better ways to get the message across. Anonymous as a whole really shows to be no more a threat as a large scale operation has not occurred since 2011, making it borderline inactive if not considered so