Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DiGrippo, initially as a means of documenting gossip related to
livejournal, but it quickly was adopted as a major platform by Anonymous for satirical and other purposes.
[37] The
not safe for work site celebrates a
subversive "
trolling culture", and documents
Internet memes,
culture, and events, such as mass pranks, trolling events, "raids", large-scale failures of Internet security, and criticism of
Internet communities that are accused of
self-censorship in order to gain prestige or positive coverage from traditional and
established media outlets. Journalist
Julian Dibbell described Encyclopædia Dramatica as the site "where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend."
[37] The site also played a role in the anti-
Scientology campaign of
Project Chanology.
[38]
On April 14, 2011, the original URL of the site was redirected to a new website named
Oh Internet that bore little resemblance to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Parts of the ED community harshly criticized the changes.
[39] In response, Anonymous launched "Operation Save ED" to rescue and restore the site's content.
[40] The Web Ecology Project made a downloadable archive of former Encyclopedia Dramatica content.
[41][42] The site's reincarnation was initially hosted at encyclopediadramatica.ch on servers owned by Ryan Cleary, who later was arrested
[43] in relation to attacks by
LulzSec against Sony.
[citation needed]
Anonymous first became associated with
hacktivism[b] in 2008 following a series of actions against the
Church of Scientologyknown as Project Chanology. On January 15, 2008, the gossip blog
Gawker posted a video in which celebrity Scientologist
Tom Cruise praised the religion;
[44] and the Church responded with a
cease-and-desist letter for violation of copyright.
[45]4chan users organized a raid against the Church in retaliation, prank-calling its hotline, sending
black faxes designed to waste ink cartridges, and launching
DDoS attacks against its websites.
[47]
The DDoS attacks were at first carried out with the
Gigaloader and
JMeter applications. Within a few days, these were supplanted by the
Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), a network stress-testing application allowing users to flood a server with
TCP or
UDP packets. The LOIC soon became a signature weapon in the Anonymous arsenal; however, it would also lead to a number of arrests of less experienced Anons who failed to conceal their
IP addresses. Some operators in Anonymous IRC channels incorrectly told or lied to new volunteers that using the LOIC carried no legal risk.
[50]
Protesters outside a Scientologycenter on February 10, 2008
During the DDoS attacks, a group of Anons uploaded a
YouTube video in which a robotic voice speaks on behalf of Anonymous, telling the "leaders of Scientology" that "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—for the laughs—we shall expel you from the Internet."
[52] Within ten days, the video had attracted hundreds of thousands of views.
[52]
On February 10, thousands of Anonymous joined simultaneous protests at Church of Scientology facilities around the world.
[53] Many protesters wore the stylized
Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the graphic novel and film
V for Vendetta, in which an anarchist revolutionary battles a totalitarian government; the masks soon became a popular symbol for Anonymous. In-person protests against the Church continued throughout the year, including "Operation Party Hard" on March 15 and "Operation Reconnect" on April 12.
[55][56][57] However, by mid-year, they were drawing far fewer protesters, and many of the organizers in IRC channels had begun to drift away from the project.
By the start of 2009, Scientologists had stopped engaging with protesters and had improved online security, and actions against the group had largely ceased. A period of infighting followed between the politically engaged members (called "moralfags" in the parlance of 4chan) and those seeking to provoke for entertainment (trolls). By September 2010, the group had received little publicity for a year and faced a corresponding drop in member interest; its raids diminished greatly in size and moved largely off of IRC channels, organizing again from the chan boards, particularly /b/.
In September 2010, however, Anons became aware of
Aiplex Software, an Indian software company that contracted with film studios to launch DDoS attacks on websites used by copyright infringers, such as
The Pirate Bay.
[61] Coordinating through IRC, Anons launched a DDoS attack on September 17 that shut down Aiplex's website for a day. Primarily using LOIC, the group then targeted the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), successfully bringing down both sites. On September 19, future LulzSec member Mustafa Al-Bassam (known as "Tflow") and other Anons hacked the website of Copyright Alliance, an anti-infringement group, and posted the name of the operation: "Payback Is A Bitch", or "Operation Payback" for short. Anons also issued a press release, stating:
Anonymous is tired of corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the people’s rights to spread information, but more importantly, the right to SHARE with one another. The RIAA and the MPAA feign to aid the artists and their cause; yet they do no such thing. In their eyes is not hope, only dollar signs. Anonymous will not stand this any longer.
[64]
In November 2010, the organization
WikiLeaks began releasing
hundreds of thousands of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. In the face of legal threats against the organization by the U.S. government,
Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers, and
PayPal,
MasterCard, and
Visa cut off service to the organization.
[72] Operation Payback then expanded to include "Operation Avenge
Assange", and Anons issued a press release declaring PayPal a target. Launching DDoS attacks with the LOIC, Anons quickly brought down the websites of the PayPal blog;
PostFinance, a Swiss financial company denying service to WikiLeaks;
EveryDNS, a web-hosting company that had also denied service; and the website of U.S. Senator
Joe Lieberman, who had supported the push to cut off services.
On December 8, Anons launched an attack against PayPal's main site. According to Topiary, who was in the command channel during the attack, the LOIC proved ineffective, and Anons were forced to rely on the
botnets of two hackers for the attack, marshaling hijacked computers for a concentrated assault. Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll also reported that the "zombie computers" of involuntary botnets had provided 90% of the attack. Topiary states that he and other Anons then "lied a bit to the press to give it that sense of abundance", exaggerating the role of the grassroots membership. However, this account was disputed.
[77]
The attacks brought down PayPal.com for an hour on December 8 and another brief period on December 9. Anonymous also disrupted the sites for Visa and MasterCard on December 8.
[79] Anons had announced an intention to bring down Amazon.com as well, but failed to do so, allegedly because of infighting with the hackers who controlled the botnets. PayPal estimated the damage to have cost the company US$5.5 million. It later provided the IP addresses of 1,000 of its attackers to the
FBI, leading to at least 14 arrests. On Thursday, December 5, 2013, 13 of the
PayPal 14 pleaded guilty to taking part in the attacks.
[82]
A member holding an Anonymous flier at Occupy Wall Street, a protest that the group actively supported, September 17, 2011
In the years following Operation Payback, targets of Anonymous protests, hacks, and DDoS attacks continued to diversify. Beginning in January 2011, Anons took a number of actions known initially as
Operation Tunisia in support of
Arab Spring movements. Tflow created a script that Tunisians could use to protect their web browsers from government surveillance, while fellow future LulzSec member
Hector Xavier Monsegur (alias "Sabu") and others allegedly hijacked servers from a London web-hosting company to launch a DDoS attack on Tunisian government websites, taking them offline. Sabu also used a Tunisian volunteer's computer to hack the website of Prime Minister
Mohamed Ghannouchi, replacing it with a message from Anonymous. Anons also helped Tunisian dissidents share videos online about the uprising.
[84] In Operation Egypt, Anons collaborated with the activist group
Telecomix to help dissidents access government-censored websites.
[84] Sabu and Topiary went on to participate in attacks on government websites in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, and Zimbabwe.
Tflow, Sabu, Topiary, and Ryan Ackroyd (known as "Kayla") collaborated in February 2011 on a cyber-attack against
Aaron Barr, CEO of the computer security firm
HBGary Federal, in retaliation for his research on Anonymous and his threat to expose members of the group. Using a
SQL injection weakness, the four hacked the HBGary site, used Barr's captured password to vandalize his Twitter feed with racist messages, and released an enormous cache of HBGary's e-mails in a
torrent file on Pirate Bay. The e-mails stated that Barr and HBGary had proposed to
Bank of America a plan to discredit WikiLeaks in retaliation for a planned leak of Bank of America documents, and the leak caused substantial public relations harm to the firm as well as leading one U.S. congressman to call for a congressional investigation.Barr resigned as CEO before the end of the month.
Several attacks by Anons have targeted organizations accused of homophobia. In February 2011, an open letter was published on AnonNews.org threatening the
Westboro Baptist Church, an organization based in
Kansas in the U.S. known for picketing funerals with signs reading "God Hates Fags". During a live radio current affairs program in which Topiary debated church member
Shirley Phelps-Roper, Anons hacked one of the organization's websites. After the church announced its intentions in December 2012 to picket the funerals of the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Anons published the names, phone numbers, and e-mail and home addresses of church members and brought down GodHatesFags.com with a DDoS attack.
[92] Hacktivists also circulated petitions to have the church's tax-exempt status investigated.
[93] In August 2012, Anons hacked the site of Ugandan Prime Minister
Amama Mbabazi in retaliation for the
Parliament of Uganda's consideration of
an anti-homosexuality law permitting capital punishment.
[94]
In April 2011, Anons launched a series of attacks against
Sony in retaliation for trying to stop hacks of the
PlayStation 3 game console. More than 100 million Sony accounts were compromised, and the Sony services
Qriocity and
PlayStation Network were taken down for a month apiece by cyberattacks.
[95]
In August 2011, Anons launched an attack against
BART in
San Francisco, which they dubbed #OpBart. The attack, made in response to the killing of Charles Hill a month prior, resulted in customers' personal information leaked onto the group's website.
[96]
When the
Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York City in September 2011, Anons were early participants and helped spread the movement to other cities such as
Boston. In October, some Anons attacked the website of the
New York Stock Exchange while other Anons publicly opposed the action via Twitter.
[97] Some Anons also helped organize an Occupy protest outside the
London Stock Exchange on May 1, 2012.
[98]
Anons launched Operation Darknet in October 2011, targeting websites hosting
child pornography. In particular, the group hacked a child pornography site called "
Lolita City" hosted by
Freedom Hosting, releasing 1,589 usernames from the site. Anons also said that they had disabled forty image-swapping pedophile websites that employed the anonymity network
Tor.
[99] In 2012, Anons leaked the names of users of a suspected child pornography site in OpDarknetV2.
[100] Anonymous launched the #OpPedoChat campaign on Twitter in 2012 as a continuation of Operation Darknet. In attempt to eliminate child pornography from the internet, the group posted the emails and IP addresses of suspected pedophiles on the online forum PasteBin.
[101][102]
In 2011, the
Koch Industries website was attacked following their attack upon union members, resulting in their website being made inaccessible for 15 minutes. In 2013, one member, a 38-year-old truck driver, pleaded guilty when accused of participating in the attack for a period of one minute, and received a sentence of two years federal probation, and ordered to pay $183,000 restitution, the amount Koch stated they paid a consultancy organisation, despite this being only a denial of service attack.
[103]
On January 19, 2012, the U.S.
Department of Justice shut down the file-sharing site
Megaupload on allegations of copyright infringement. Anons responded with a wave of DDoS attacks on U.S. government and copyright organizations, shutting down the sites for the RIAA, MPAA,
Broadcast Music, Inc., and the FBI.
[104]
In 2012, Anonymous launched Operation Anti-Bully: Operation Hunt Hunter in retaliation to Hunter Moore's revenge porn site, "Is Anyone Up?" Anonymous crashed Moore's servers and publicized much of his personal information online, including his social security number. The organization also published the personal information of Andrew Myers, the proprietor of "Is Anyone Back", a copycat site of Mr. Moore's "Is Anyone Up?"
[105]
In response to
Operation Pillar of Defense, a November 2012 Israeli military operation in the
Gaza Strip, Anons took down hundreds of Israeli websites with DDoS attacks.
[106]Anons pledged another "
massive cyberassault" against Israel in April 2013 in retaliation for its actions in
Gaza, promising to "wipe Israel off the map of the Internet".
[107]However, its DDoS attacks caused only temporary disruptions, leading cyberwarfare experts to suggest that the group had been unable to recruit or hire botnet operators for the attack.
[108][109]
