The online movement known as Anonymous had a fairly busy weekend and even managed to push their “fun” into Monday. According to several of the Anonymous twitter accounts they are now rather upset at PasteBin. It seems that the owner of PasteBin is unhappy about the uses that Anonymous has put his “code sharing” site to. He laments that it was never intended for the sharing of sensitive information and has even stated he is going to hire additional workers to help remove these types of posts. This had an interesting effect on the collective where tweets saying things like “Srsly Pastebin, f*** you - @Pastebin to hire staff to tackle hackers' 'sensitive' posts” .Of course they were still using Pastebin to post the fruits of their hacks as little as 11 hours ago (as of this writing). These tweets were highlighted with words like “retweet ASAP”. This seemed to be an indication that they are expecting the information to be removed quickly. Although many are linking this to censorship (and yes, it is censorship) there is a small legal aspect that Pastebin has to worry about. After the take down of MegaUpload and the efforts to take down other file sharing sites Pastebin could be implicated in the release of this data. This could mean fines, jail time for the owners and even the seizure of the site (just like MegaUpload). Of course this is not going to stem the angry feelings that are spreading around the Anonymous circles, but we can at least begin to understand why Pastebin would be doing this now.
On another side of the Anonymous world there were multiple tweets linking new DOS tools, hacking guides and even a SQL Injection Cheat Sheet. It seems that Anonymous is pushing out the “tools of the trade” to the masses which could mean an increase of attacks in the near future. Our personal favorite tweet was one that happened late last night it said only “Cheez-Its are awesome. That is all”
What we are seeing here is the opening moves in a new campaign, Anonymous have made it very clear that they are not “hurt”, “damaged”, or anything by the arrest of Sabu or other individuals that the FBI have picked up. They are most likely looking to increase their numbers and also to push forward with new attacks on their favorite targets; corporate entities and the governments that seem to bow to their demands. In fact there is already one in the works; it is called OpTrialAtHome and being run by AnonOpUK in protest to the extradition of Chris Tappin, Richard O’Dwyer and Gary McKinnon. You can also expect continued attacks in protest to the SOPA fill-ins like the Cyber Security Act of 2012 as well as many legitimate civil rights concerns.
The next few months should be interesting; as always we will continue to follow their activities and to try and answer some of the why’s that go with the general movement.
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