Facebook Hacker 2013 By Anonymous
Ingelore Clason
Facebook Pages give public figures, businesses, and other entities a presence on Facebook that isn't tied to an individual profile. The accounts behind those pages are anonymous unless a Page owner opts to make the admins public. You can't see, for example, the names of the people who post to Facebook on WIRED's behalf. But a bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one.
Journalists have commented that Anonymous' secrecy, fabrications, and media awareness pose an unusual challenge for reporting on the group's actions and motivations.[31][32] Quinn Norton of Wired writes that: "Anons lie when they have no reason to lie. They weave vast fabrications as a form of performance. Then they tell the truth at unexpected and unfortunate times, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. They are unpredictable."[31] Norton states that the difficulties in reporting on the group cause most writers, including herself, to focus on the "small groups of hackers who stole the limelight from a legion, defied their values, and crashed violently into the law" rather than "Anonymous's sea of voices, all experimenting with new ways of being in the world".[31]
Users of 4chan's /b/ board would occasionally join into mass pranks or raids.[34] In a raid on July 12, 2006, for example, large numbers of 4chan readers invaded the Finnish social networking site Habbo Hotel with identical avatars; the avatars blocked regular Habbo members from accessing the digital hotel's pool, stating it was "closed due to fail and AIDS".[37] Future LulzSec member Topiary became involved with the site at this time, inviting large audiences to listen to his prank phone calls via Skype.[38][a] Due to the growing traffic on 4chan's board, users soon began to plot pranks off-site using Internet Relay Chat (IRC).[40] These raids resulted in the first mainstream press story on Anonymous, a report by Fox station KTTV in Los Angeles, California in the U.S. The report called the group "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and an "Internet hate machine".[33][41]
With more than 10 thousand followers on their IRC server waiting for instructions, they felt they had to come up with something, and got the idea of a worldwide protest. Because they both wanted to use a symbol or image to unify the protests, and because all protesters were supposed to be anonymous, it was decided to use a mask. Due to shipment problems caused by the short amount of time to prepare, they improvised and called all the costume and comic book-shops in the major cities around the world, and found that the only mask available in all the cities was the Guy Fawkes mask from the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta, in which an anarchist revolutionary battles a totalitarian government. The suggestion of the choice of mask was well received. On February 10, thousands of Anonymous joined simultaneous protests at Church of Scientology facilities in 142 cities in 43 countries.[58][59][60] The stylized Guy Fawkes masks soon became a popular symbol for Anonymous.[61] In-person protests against the Church continued throughout the year, including "Operation Party Hard" on March 15 and "Operation Reconnect" on April 12.[62][63][64] 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.[65]
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.[82] Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll also reported that the "zombie computers" of involuntary botnets had provided 90% of the attack.[83] 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.[84]
The attacks brought down PayPal.com for an hour on December 8 and another brief period on December 9.[85] Anonymous also disrupted the sites for Visa and MasterCard on December 8.[86] 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.[87] 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.[88] On Thursday, December 5, 2013, 13 of the PayPal 14 pleaded guilty to taking part in the attacks.[89]
In July 2011, Anonymous announced the launch of its social media platform Anonplus.[103] This came after Anonymous' presence was removed from Google+.[104] The site was later hacked by a Turkish hackers group who placed a message on the front page and replaced its logo with a picture of a dog.[105]
On September 13, Anonymous released a large quantity of private data belonging to Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content.[194] Epik had briefly provided services to an abortion "whistleblower" website run by the anti-abortion Texas Right to Life organization, but the reporting form went offline on September 4 after Epik told the group they had violated their terms of service by collecting private information about third parties.[195] The data included domain purchase and transfer details, account credentials and logins, payment history, employee emails, and unidentified private keys.[196] The hackers claimed they had obtained "a decade's worth of data" which included all customers and all domains ever hosted or registered through the company, and which included poorly encrypted passwords and other sensitive data stored in plaintext.[196][197] Later on September 13, the Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) organization said they were working to curate the allegedly leaked data for more accessible download, and said that it consisted of "180 gigabytes of user, registration, forwarding and other information".[198] Publications including The Daily Dot and The Record by Recorded Future subsequently confirmed the veracity of the hack and the types of data that had been exposed.[199][197] Anonymous released another leak on September 29, this time publishing bootable disk images of Epik's servers;[200][201] more disk images as well as some leaked documents from the Republican Party of Texas appeared on October 4.[202]
Anonymous launched a cyber operation against the Iranian government for the alleged murder of Mahsa Amini. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against Iran's government and state-owned websites.[229] On September 23, 2022, a hacktivist named "Edaalate Ali" hacked Iran's state tv government channel during the middle of broadcast and released CCTV footage of Iran's prison facilities.[230][231] On Sunday, October 23, 2022 that an Iranian hacker group known as "Black Reward" published confidential files and documents email system belonging to Iran's nuclear program.[232][233] Black Reward announced on their Telegram channel that they have hacked into 324 emails which that contained more than a hundred thousand messages and over 50 gigabytes of files.[234] A hacktivist group by the name "Lab Dookhtegan" published the Microsoft Excel macros, PowerShell exploits APT34 reportedly used to target organizations across the world[235].[236][237]
Beginning in June 2011, hackers from Anonymous and LulzSec collaborated on a series of cyber attacks known as "Operation AntiSec". On June 23, in retaliation for the passage of the immigration enforcement bill Arizona SB 1070, LulzSec released a cache of documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, including the personal information and home addresses of many law enforcement officers.[258] On June 22, LulzSec Brazil took down the websites of the Government of Brazil and the President of Brazil.[259][260] Later data dumps included the names, addresses, phone numbers, Internet passwords, and Social Security numbers of police officers in Arizona,[261] Missouri,[262] and Alabama.[263] AntiSec members also stole police officer credit card information to make donations to various causes.[264]
Graham Cluley, a security expert for Sophos, argued that Anonymous' actions against child porn websites hosted on a darknet could be counterproductive, commenting that while their intentions may be good, the removal of illegal websites and sharing networks should be performed by the authorities, rather than Internet vigilantes.[293]Some commentators also argued that the DDoS attacks by Anonymous following the January 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act protests had proved counterproductive. Molly Wood of CNET wrote that "[i]f the SOPA/PIPA protests were the Web's moment of inspiring, non-violent, hand-holding civil disobedience, #OpMegaUpload feels like the unsettling wave of car-burning hooligans that sweep in and incite the riot portion of the play."[294] Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle concurred, stating that "Anonymous' actions hurt the movement to kill SOPA/PIPA by highlighting online lawlessness."[295] The Oxford Internet Institute's Joss Wright wrote that "In one sense the actions of Anonymous are themselves, anonymously and unaccountably, censoring websites in response to positions with which they disagree."[296]
Sam Esmail shared in an interview with Motherboard that he was inspired by Anonymous when creating the USA Network hacktivist drama, Mr. Robot.[300] Furthermore, Wired calls the "Omegas", a fictitious hacker group in the show, "a clear reference to the Anonymous offshoot known as LulzSec".[301] In the TV series Elementary a hacktivist collective called "Everyone" plays a recurring role; there are several hints and similarities to Anonymous.[302]
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