Anonymous Research Paper

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Anonymous’ Big Day Out On February 3, 2012 the hacker group Anonymous successfully hacked the Department of Homeland Securities website by crippling it and denying access - a major source of embarrassment for the DHS. And if that wasn’t enough Anonymous also, on the very same day, leaked a recorded conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard about Anonymous, defaced the Boston Police Department’s website, brought down the Greek government’s Ministry of Justice website, and defaced numerous religious websites (Narayanasamy, 2012) (RT, 2012). One month later, at RSA’s annual conference in San Francisco, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, "Terrorism does remain the FBI's top priority, but in the not too-distant-future we anticipate that the cyberthreat will pose the greatest threat to our country." (Cowley, 2012).…show more content…
Bringing down websites or defacing them is the main means of getting their message out to the public. Even though Anonymous has an “official” twitter feed, the ethereal nature of the group means that, in part, almost anyone can hack a website and then claim they are part of the group Anonymous. And it is not unimaginable that these stunts are used as an initiation to get into the group. The DHS website was apparently only down for a couple of minutes and highlights that the attacks on February 3 were fairly harmless and probably unsophisticated. In fact, in August of 2011, DHS had a threat assessment released that claims that most of the Anonymous group is nothing more than “script kiddies” (Nguyen, 2011). Script kiddies are hackers that use tools that have been written by other, wiser hackers, and simplify for the uneducated the means to hack a website (among other things). Script kiddie is a rather demeaning term in the hacking world. Maybe DHS poked them with a stick here. Website
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