OpFreeAssange turns into a feeding frenzy in the UK

It was always to be expected that hacktivists would respond vigorously to the effective house arrest of Julian Assange within the Ecuador Embassy in London, and the UK’s apparent determination to extradite him to Sweden.

Now what has been labeled OpFreeAssange is gathering pace, with hacktivists hacking and DDoS’ing a growing number of organizations – some because they are government-related and others just perhaps because they can. The Cambridge University hack may be one of the latter – surprising even @AnonOpUK, who tweeted, “Why are people hacking universities for #OpFreeAssange? #Assange and #WikiLeaks stands up for freedom of knowledge! I just don't get it :/.”

But one thing is clear, this isn’t just another example of script-kiddie supporters aiming their LOIC at specified targets at a specific time – these are genuine hackers (sometimes the team called NullCrew, often a hacker known as 0x00x00) using their skills to break into, deface and steal data. A quick scout around the internet while writing this report found 0x00x00’s trademark Assange poster inserted, and still live, on the home pages of hand2hand-recruitment.co.uk, the Northern Ireland Home Office, and Norex.