Cause baby you’re a firework… (baby is a.k.a. Anonymous Group)
December 10, 2010
“The creatively named consortium, Anonymous, has failed to take down Amazon.com as part of their Operation Payback in support of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower site that released thousands of diplomatic cables from American embassies and Washington offices. Earlier in the week, the Anonymous computer hackers created a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) disaster for PayPal and MasterCard. They also disrupted service at Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is believed to have closed an account that posted a stolen list of MasterCard credit cards with owner details.
Operation Payback has even interfered with Web sites representing Sarah Palin, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Pa.), and the Swedish Government. (The Swedish Government is holding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in jail for alleged sexual assault charges.)
However Amazon.com survived. The cabal of hackers, mostly teenagers, directed their ire at Paypal instead. By initially targeting Amazon during the holiday shopping season—which could have been a disaster for the online merchant—Anonymous could have made its greatest show of support of WikiLeaks. (WikiLeaks does not endorse the actions of Anonymous.) Apparently, it wasn’t the firewall around Amazon’s computer’s that kept Operation Payback out, it was infighting within the fractious group itself. The band set out to flood Amazon’s computer’s causing DDOS problems, however, at one point they issued an e-mail saying,
“We are currently attacking PayPal…With the Amazon attack, they are simply too big for us right now. Maybe at a later time we can try them again.”
This reporter checked in at Amazon in the early afternoon and found it running just fine. (Fine enough to do a little Christmas shopping, in fact.) There were no signs of anything running sluggishly. The fact that the group quailed at the size of Amazon shows a lack of leadership among the poorly organized conglomerate of young people, who have insisted that they have no leader. It may signal the end of the sustained vigor of Operation Payback.
However, a member of Anonymous, who wishes only to be know by his online pseudonym Coldblood, said to London’s the Guardian newspaper that the group’s campaign would go on “for a while, mainly just because of how successful the attacks have been.”
Behind The Stage Blog 