Anonymous (group)

Anonymous are a hacker group that originally formed on 4chan. Their main goal is to defend the Net against various organisations which they see as attacking or abusing it; they do this primarily by attacking the networks of those organisations. Their first attacks in 2008 were against the Church of Scientology, which has a long history of controversial actions involving the Net.

They became better known with Operation Payback, a series of denial of service (DoS) attacks against companies which had been conducting DoS attacks on BitTorrent sites. Later it broadened to include attacks on a number of film and music companies who were attacking "piracy" in various other ways. Still later, they expanded into politically-motivated hacktivism.

LOIC
One of their main weapons is software called LOIC, Low Orbit Ion Cannon; the image is an armed satellite that reduces buildings below to smoking heaps of rubble. The reality is more prosaic; LOIC creates a voluntary botnet which conducts denial of service attacks. Targets are announced via IRC discussions or other channels. Anyone who has downloaded LOIC (estimated 40,000 as of late 2011) can join an attack just by typing the target name into the software. LOIC has been analysed by researchers. Anonymous players are not so anonymous; the attacks are easily traced.

There is a legal argument that participating in a group effort to flood a website and thereby knock it offline (a denial of service attack using LOIC) is not illegal "hacking", merely the quite legal cyber-equivalent of participating in a sit-in. Instead of disrupting some apparently evil organisation's activities by sitting in at their offices (which is only effective if a lot of people join in), you just tell your computer to hammer their web site with requests (which crashes the site if enough people do it). Of course lawyers for the targets of such attacks are almost certain to reject this argument, as are prosecutors in some jurisdictions. Morozov mentions one German court decision in which the argument was accepted, but unfortunately he does not give a legal citation.

LOIC has been exploited as a vector for malware; a version containing a trojan for the Zeus botnet was distributed at one point.

Other attacks
Not all their attacks use LOIC or are limited to denial of service. One description of Anonymous is:

“Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,” said Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. “You have four or five guys who really know what they’re doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.”

Basically, LOIC is a tool that allows a large number of players (the "legion of idiots") to participate in attacks. However, the "handful of geniuses" have a rather broad range of other weapons.

Another description, from inside the group, is:

The average Anon is not like me, working 12 hours a day dedicating their life to this. He’s an IT guy or a cable installer with a few hours to spare and he wants to be told what to do. It takes organizers to get things done.

Defending WikiLeaks
In December 2010 Anonymous "declared war" on the enemies of WikiLeaks; see the WikiLeaks article. Since then, more of their attacks have been relatively sophisticated and many of the targets have been members of the (mainly US) security apparatus attacking WikiLeaks.

One attack was against HBGary, a computer security firm that does quite a bit of business with the US government. The company planned attacks on WikiLeaks. Anonymous broke into the company networks and posted various documents they found there to WikiLeaks .

In December 2011, they broke into the US-based think tank Stratfor, which claims to provide "global intelligence" and whose clients include major companies and several US government departments. They made off with a client list, which they promptly published, and a large amount of email. Somewhat later, WikiLeaks began to release the email files, calling them the global intelligence files.

Early in 2012, they released tapes of a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard discussing the two agencies' plans against Anonymous.

In February 2012, someone took down the CIA website with a distributed denial of service attack. Some have attributed this to Anonymous, but the attribution is distinctly uncertain.

Defending the Pirate Bay
In May 2012, Anonymous did a bit of returning to their roots, attacking a site for its owners' "anti-piracy" actions. The briefly took down the British Internet firm Virgin Media site with a DDoS attack because Virgin was blocking the Pirate Bay in compliance with a UK court order to all ISPs.

Interestingly, the Pirate Bay were critical of this move, saying "We believe in the open and free Internet, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship."

Political targets
Anonymous have released some of Syrian President Bashar Assad's email.

In February 2012, they attacked the Vatican. They probably did not act alone on this; the dissatisfaction with the Church originated with South American radicals who may also have been involved in the attack. The attack was recorded and analyzed, giving some insight into Anonymous tactics. They first probed the systems for weaknesses and, finding none, then fell back to a simple denial of service attack.

In April, they attacked a large number of Chinese government sites and, a bit later, some British government ones.

Legal actions against them
Various alleged members of Anonymous or related groups such as Lulz sec have been arrested or prosecuted in several jurisdictions.

Several stories report that some Anonymous members have been arrested.

Meanwhile, four in Holland have been released.

One arrested in UK.

Paypal gives FBI some IP addresses. 

More on FBI vs Anonymous. A (possibly bogus) leaked document says they threaten national security.

Interpol arrests 25 suspects. .

Spin-offs
There has been considerable internal dissension and some splinter groups have formed.