“To our hacker allies, our fellow occupiers, our militant comrades all over the world, the time for talk is over: it’s time to hack and smash, beat and shag.”
Forbes - The call to arms issued last week by the international hacker group Anonymous was accompanied by a frenzy of online hacking. Attackers took down the websites of a tear-gas manufacturer in Pennsylvania, the Nasdaq and BATS stock exchanges and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. A few days later they hacked into websites owned by the Federal Trade Commission and the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
The messages they left behind—about their opposition to everything from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a controversial new treaty for enforcing intellectual property rights, to violent suppression of democracy protestors in the Middle East—had the air of giddy jubilation.
“Guess what? We’re back for round two,” the hackers wrote in reference to their attack on the FTC websites, their second such raid on the agency in less than a month. “With the doomsday clock ticking down on Internet freedom, Antisec has leapt into action. Again. Holy deja vu hack Batman! Expect us yet?”
Comic posturing aside, the hackers seemed amazed by their success: A barely organized ragtag “team of mayhem,” as one Anonymous offshoot dubbed itself, was knocking down the Web infrastructure built by major corporations and large government agencies as if it were nothing but paper backdrops in a school play. More
