Anonymous

Hack the planet and save the world is the rallying cry of an army of keyboard warriors known as Anonymous, which in the last 18 months has targeted everyone from the Tunisian government to the Boston police, the Vatican to Sony, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to PayPal, blocking their websites or retrieving embarrassing files and emails for the world to see.

Will the hacker group Anonymous make good on its threat to take down the Internet Saturday? Probably not. But it could slow it down, according to a number of security experts. And it may depend in part on how unified Anonymous is about the attack -- there are some indications of divisions within the group.

Dominican Republican police have arrested six alleged hackers in the capital Santiago who have been accused of belonging to the local branch of Anonymous. 

Hackers operating under the banner of “Anonymous” have threatened YouTube with an attack if the video sharing site does not restore access to a closed down account.

The hackers appear annoyed at the blocking of an account belonging to a user calling themselves 'Theanonmessage' and while YouTube has taken down Anonymous videos before, it has never raised this much of ire. 

So apparently LulzSec are making a return - on April fools' day. Yeah, exactly. A Youtube video has been released claiming the return of LulzSec in what they're calling Operation LulzDay and a supposed Project Mayhem scheduled for December 21st. 

When the FBI arrested LulzSec leader Hector "Sabu" Monsegur, they did so in a hurry—hours before the arrest, Sabu was doxed, his identity posted to the Internet. With his name public, federal agents feared that he would start destroying evidence to protect himself, so they ended their covert surveillance and moved in, according to Fox News.

Efforts to name and shame the LulzSec crew during its 50-day rampage were common. Many of these doxings were inaccurate, a result of faulty inferences or deliberate attempts to mislead on the part of the LulzSec hackers.

While Anonymous managed to take down Interpol's website on at the end of February and have defaced a number of vulnerable sites including, most recently, Panda Security, threats to take down bigger targets have often failed to materialize. What some believed to be the group's boldest plan yet—an effort to bring down the Internet's entire Domain Name System (DNS) in what they're calling #opGlobalBlackout  

No one who has seen it forgets the "Twilight Zone" episode about a town in Ohio that lives in terror of a 6-year-old born with godlike powers. One man who opposes the boy finds himself turned into a jack-in-a-box for thinking "bad thoughts." If the "hacktivist" collective known as Anonymous has something in common with a willful, dangerous child, then Aaron Barr is the adult who got in trouble for thinking bad thoughts.

Jeff Johnston takes an inside look at CanAnon, the Canadian branch of Anonymous, witnessing first hand how through the influence of the Anonymous culture, young Canadians now have the ability to easily organize massive online protests. 

Alleged LulzSec hacker Ryan Ackroyd who appeared before Westminster Magistrates' Court last Friday has been released on bail under the condition that he would not access the internet or possess any device that could do so.