Anonymous

The hackers behind the year-end attack on the security consulting firm Stratfor have struck again, although this time it appears they are just out for a few laughs.

The Anonymous hacktivist collective dropped its Operation Hiroshima bomb on New Year's Day, and despite its success in pulling off a large-scale, wide-reaching document dump, the event has received very little coverage by the mainstream media.

Known best by its Twitter hashtag #OpHiroshima, the dump was an organized attempt to "dox," or release as much incriminating and integral information as possible on one day about institutions, officials, corporations and other entities with which various sectors of the diverse Anon collective have grievances.

A German subset of the hacker collective Anonymous is taking aim at neo-Nazi websites.

In an effort dubbed "Operation Blitzkrieg," Anonymous is trying to bring down neo-Nazi-affiliated websites and publish private data from the people who patronize them.

Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas recently became the latest victim of the online hacker collective Anonymous after their servers were breached over the Christmas weekend and information was stolen. Up until now the website of the security think tank remains offline, with the AntiSec arm of Anonymous claiming full responsibility.

Hackers operating under the name Anonymous launched massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against major Egyptian government websites, including the ones of the president, Egyptian state media, the military site Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and a site that promotes tourism.

After the operation went down, one of the hackers involved contacted me on an IRC channel and provided me with some interesting details, but also with the reasons why the attack was launched.

Hacktivist group Anonymous has announced its intention to steal from banks and "bring happiness and gratitude to families around the globe" with a new campaign called 'DestructiveSec'.

In a statement it said "this Christmas we wish to give back to the people who had everything taken" and "this Christmas we are stealing from the banks who stole from you and giving you back what was rightfully yours in the first place". It gave no hint to its target, saying: “Any Country. Any Age. Anything. We're giving Santa Claus a break this year.”

The Anonymous hacktivist group claims it is responsible for putting a Washington, D.C. public relations firm out of business.

But a former executive at the now-defunct company, known as The Bivings Group, denies the allegations.

Hacktivist groups Anonymous and TeaMp0isoN have joined together in a new campaign that involves compromising credit card details and using them to donate money to charities, homeless people and anti-government protesters around the world.

The two hacker outfits, who call their alliance p0isAnon, have named the new credit card fraud campaign "Operation Robin Hood" in reference to the famous English outlaw who, according to folklore, stole money from the rich and gave it to the poor.

In a recent experiment writer Andy Baio was able to uncover the identities of seven anonymous bloggers from a random sample of 50 in under 30 minutes; all thanks to a simple mistake they'd made in setting up their websites.

"One blog about Anonymous' hacking operations could easily be tracked to the founder's consulting firm, while another tracking Mexican cartels was tied to a second domain with the name and address of a San Diego man."

A Special Agent Supervisor of the CA Department of Justice is the latest victim of Anonymous who claims that their operations against the FBI succeeded once again after managing to hack two of his Gmail accounts.

As a result, 38,000 emails containing “detailed computer forensics techniques, investigation protocols as well as highly embarrassing personal information,” were published online.