One section of class yesterday that really grabbed my attention was the part about hackers. I did a little research about hacking and found out some information about a particularly large group of hackers who call themselves "anonymous." This group known as "anonymous" was started about eight years ago on the website/imageboard known as 4chan.org and has wreaked havoc on many websites since their beginning. This group has "declared war" on many institutions and companies such as the Spanish government, the Turkish Telecommunications Authority, Mastercard, and Paypal. These attacks were sparked by a variety of reasons, such as the police of certain countries hunting down members of anonymous and arresting them, which is the case for both the Spain and Turkey incidents. In these attacks they temporarily knocked out the website for Spain's national government and took over the website of the Turkish Telecommunications Authority and shut it down for nearly a day. The reason this group attacked the websites of Mastercard and Paypal was that they cut off their former funding to Wikileaks, which "is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks). In one of the articles i read about the group it says that they also led an attack on Sony and that they were planning to go after the Federal Reserve.
According to one of the members of Anonymous, "In general, the members rally around the belief that "people who hoard information are the same people who hoard wealth." It's amazing to see the ways that certain people can use the Internet to wage "wars" standing up for certain beliefs. If you would like to read more about anonymous here is an article that has a bunch of information about them:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/15/anonymous-hackers-to-ben-_n_877337.html
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