I’ve always been a fan of the hacker group Anonymous… or at least, until recently. Anonymous, the large group of moralistic hackers who have terrorized the church of Scientology and most recently companies who withdrew support from wikileaks, made more mainstream news when they hacked Gawker and stole millions of email addresses linked to users.
That’s where I lost them as a supporter. I appreciated their hacking of the mega companies as a form of protest against pulling support for wikileaks (a stand that, if illegal, was at least principled). And plus, all it really did was shut down the websites of a few companies with DDoS attacks, which a site usually recovers from pretty quickly and causes little long-term damage. But attacking Gawker and releasing private information of innocent people for no reason? That’s just meaningless harm.
A few days ago somebody may have gotten their revenge for the Gawker hack, and it may have been for the same reasons. A member of the group apparently leaked chat logs and personally identifying information of lead hackers to Gawker in a sort of karmic retribution. The logs, if real, display the paranoia and egocentric nature of a pseudo-hierarchical group of hackers, and basically little else. They reference hacks they’ve made, they freak out once when they think they’ve been made, and that’s basically it. The logs might be fake, sure, but based on how boring most of the chats are, I’m more inclined to believe that a fringe member just scraped up every log they had and thought it might be enough to give him credibility as a snitch.
It’ll be interesting to see if the information purported to identify the hackers pans out, but in the meantime it looks like Anonymous is still alive: They may have just attacked another website today.
danielmarkmiller.net 