Anonymous prepares strike against PROTECT IP Act in Operation Payback

The notorious hacktivist group Anonymous, which was recently blamed for the hack on Sony PlayStation Network is preparing for yet another assault. The group is calling its members and supporters for Operation Payback, on the lines of Operation Payback that attacked websites of companies like PayPal and Mastercard in support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The latest assault is being prepared in a response to recent actions of the U.S. Government, the RIAA, the MPAA and others. “For some time now, powerful interests have been vigorously lobbying the US Government in a campaign to censor the Internet. The PROTECT IP Act is the result of their campaign. Through domain seizures, ISP blockades, search engine censorship, and funding cuts to allegedly copyright infringing websites, the PROTECT IP Act will take Internet censorship to the next level. In its present form, this act threatens the very foundation on which the Internet was built: freedom of thought,” the hacktivist group said on its website explaining the motivation of attack.

The group claims that instead of reducing piracy, this bill endangers the free flow of information. Through domain seizures, ISP blockades, search engine censorship, and the restriction of funding to websites accused of infringement, this bill promises to take Internet censorship to the next level. Furthermore, it violates the citizens ‘ rights to due process, to free speech, to free expression and to legal representation at their hearing.

Anonymous is known to launch DDoS attacks as a form of protest. The group apart from bringing down PayPal and Mastercard, claimed responsibility for DDoS attacks against The Westboro Baptist Church and New Zealand Parliament websites. The group however, denied involvement in the attack on Sony PSN. Lately, the group’s own IRC website was hacked by one of its members, post which the IRC was shifted to another website.

Now, Anonymous is calling upon its supporters to join its IRC channels (Internet Relay Chat) to coordinate and launch the attack(s).

Anonymous targets its own wiki, Encyclopædia Dramatica

The next target of the hacktivist group Anonymous could possibly be Encyclopædia Dramatica (ED),  a satirical open wiki which was frequently utilized  by the group itself to celebrate a subversive “trolling culture”. Anonymous group members used the platform to document significant incidents of underground internet events such as mass organized pranks (trolling events they termed as “raids”), large scale failures of the internet infrastructure and security, and criticism of some more conservative internet communities they accused of self-censoring their own content in order to garner prestige. But now, there’s a twist in the tale.

Recently the founders and creators of ED and whatport80.com have committed web design seppuku, purposely demolishing both sites for the newly announced ohinternet.com. Anonymous terms this new site as, “a poorly made SFW version of ED meant as a stunt to literally reduce bandwidth, as, according to them, the “server costs were too high”.”

The very owners of Encylopædia Dramatica have stated this, as well as their intention to sue anyone who tries to replicate, mirror, or redistribute ED. “This, in essence, destroys ED in its entirety,” the group noted on its website. Anonymous has also informed that an archive is in the making for public use that will be freely available, regardless of what the owners demand. “One thing the owners did not realize is that the intellectual property belongs to the writers; this means they technically do not even own the materials on ED,” they said, justifying the move.

Anonymous feels that it is unacceptable that a company would go to such lengths, with such disregard for their user base – that they, in their words “do not care about” – merely to save money on bandwidth; something that is nowadays very cheap. All this would have been tolerable to Anonymous, had they released an archive of the ED content – however, they have not done this, do not have any plans of doing so in the future, and were unable to provide a solid reason as to why no archive was released.

“This is an outright insult to those whom, over the years, have worked hard to make ED what it was. This is a direct affront to the contributors – whose work is now essentially thrown away,” Anoymous said.

The recently turned hyper active group is now inviting its followers for an open discussion on what actions should now be taken for this situation over IRC networks.

The group would also be organizing a mass protest both over the internet as well as on streets and Sony stores against Sony tomorrow to protest the company’s recent actions against PS3 hacker, GeoHot.

Fight between Sony and Anonymous to intensify

The hacktivist group Anonymous is heightening it’s aggression against anyone who stands in the way of freedom to information. At the moment their target seems to be Sony. The group that recently brought down a number of Websites owned by Sony Corporation is now vowing to take ‘other ways’ to teach the company a lesson.

Sony recently sued a famed hacker George Hotz, who is popularly known as GeoHot in the security community for jailbreaking Sony PS3 gaming console. Though Sony and Hotz have reportedly reached a settlement, Anonymous is in no mood of a truce as it gears up for an in-store protest against Sony on April 16th.

Anonymous’ demands include allowing PlayStation owners to be able to modify their consoles and share content online — in essence to be able to legally jailbreak the consoles — as well as having Sony cease its legal actions against PlayStation hackers.

Anonymous is leveraging its large fan following on Twitter, Facebook, IRC, youtube and even its ‘official’ website to gather support. A part of the message that the group is promoting through these platforms reads:

On April 16th, we will take the protests against Sony to the streets. We encourage anyone who is able to come to a nearby Sony Store to support the cause, even if you are not usually involved with Anonymous. This is not just about Anonymous – this is about your rights.

The group is also urging people to make preparations before the actual protest takes place. It says that people who are interested in being a part of the protest should set up a ‘legal team’ that consists of at least 1 person that does not take part in the protest itself, who is in contact with a lawyer. Also, people are asked to make sure the phone number of the ‘legal team’ is written on your arm with something like permanent marker, to make sure they cannot lose it in a full body search – better safe than sorry.

Explaining their propaganda for launching the attacks on Sony, Anonymous wrote on its website.”Their (Sony’s) propaganda regarding jailbreaking implies that it encourages piracy and thereby makes people lose their jobs, whereas jailbreaking actually just means you are making YOUR device do what it should do. Imagine if Microsoft forced you to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox or Chrome. Imagine if they denied users from using any other web browser than their own. Many people would obviously be pissed… but then, why aren’t you pissed at Sony?,”

Trying to win people instead of being termed as a notorious hacker group, Anonymous has claimed that it has no intention of putting gamers or end users in trouble. Its website states, “Anonymous is on your side, standing up for your rights. We are not aiming to attack customers of Sony. This attack is aimed solely at Sony, and we will try our best to not affect the gamers, as this would defeat the purpose of our actions.”

Sony hasn’t so far acknowledged the attacks by Anonymous and has termed the reason for the outages on its websites as ‘server maintenance’. So far, Anonymous seems to have an upper hand after Sony withdrew its suit against Holtz. Let’s wait and watch where this battle goes…