Hacks Done By Anonymous For The Greater Good

Anonymous is a group of hacktivists, and hacktivism is our way of protesting against societal and governmental unfairness. While non-fierce, lots of acts of hacktivism are against the law – or are at least lawfully ambiguous – which leads many perpetrators to work incognito.

However, a number of people believe that equality is not promised by the law of their respective nations. As a result, many people perceive hacktivists as brave vigilantes, who make use of their tech magic to protect the public good.

However, in the last few years, a group of hacktivists, known as Anonymous, has achieved a number of famous hacks. In the list below, we have outlined a couple of them:-

PROJECT CHANOLOGY (2008)

We should never forget our past..??? #chanology pic.twitter.com/oGVK03aSUe

— Anon.Dos (@AnonDos_AnonHQ) 15 May 2016

Anonymous attained worldwide recognition eight years ago, with an extensive run up against the Church of Scientology, which was also known as Project Chanology. The group hacked the church’s domains and overloaded their fax machines with colored faxes. In addition, they even destroyed the reputation of the church on Google, i.e. whenever anyone used the search term ‘Scientology’, the church’s name would appear next to a negative comment.

Attacking the Church of Scientology was Anonymous’ response to the church’s online censoring efforts. Also, Scientology filed a claim against YouTube for copyright infringements, after one of its clips was released and published on YouTube. The clip featured Hollywood star Tom Cruise, a devoted Scientologist, who praised the morals of Scientology in a way that made him look brainwashed, according to commentators.

However, the group replied to the lawsuit against YouTube by publishing a video (featured above) against Scientology, which has been watched more than 5 million times, since it was uploaded eight years ago.

If you would like to read a detailed article about Project Chanology, please click here.

BAY AREA RAPID TRANSIT ATTACK (2011)

Almost five years ago, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, based in San Francisco, closed their underground mobile phone services due to a protest that was supposed to take place on the train platforms later that day. Demonstrators decided to prevent the locomotives from operating, in reaction to the calamitous firing of an unarmed traveller by the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police. However, lacking the ability to correlate their initiatives via cellphones, the protest never flourished.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit’s censoring came across with an instantaneous news thunderstorm, and Anonymous immediately answered with a number of strikes. Initially, the hackers attacked their customer outreach site (currently, the site says coming soon) and published all of their customer information, such as their names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

In addition, they also published a declaration of policy, as well as aims outlining that the Bay Area Rapid Transit had violated the peoples’ right to come together. Eventually, Anonymous broke into a website that belonged to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Department, and published the personal information (i.e. names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.) of many police officials. They also arranged a number of protests on the train platforms.

Lastly, when the Bay Area Rapid Transit declined Anonymous’ requests, its representative, Linton Johnson, would not acknowledge that they had suspended the mobile phone services that day. So, as a result of his statements, Anonymous published his naked photos all over the web.

If you would like to read a detailed article about the Bay Area Rapid Transit Operation, please click here.

DARK DISCOVERY (2011)

Anonymous gained attention and praise after taking down more than 50 illicit child porn publishing websites and domains. Anonymous noticed a cache of those sites while exploring a list of websites that were published in the Hidden Wiki, which is a website with a lot of hidden or deep net web sites that cannot be accessed by a normal web browser.

The collective group primarily focused on Lolita City (some say the website has been reactivated under a different ownership) which was a file uploading website utilized by paedophiles, and released personal details of more than a thousand active website users and visitors.

Not only did Operation Darknet help the law enforcement agencies, it also made their work easy. Plus, it also revealed a downside of cyberspace. The dark web is not only challenging to get into for a normal user, but it is also intentionally disguised using encryption, making it hard for people to hack into it.

If you would like to read a detailed article about Operation Darknet, please click here. And if you would like to see the Pastebin, please click here.

CYBER-GATE (2011)

In the second month of 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive officer of the online security company HBGary Federal, stated that his company had systematically crept into the Anonymous collective and wanted to uncover details about its members in one of their future conferences (that never happened). So, naturally, Anonymous took a stand.

Hacker(s) compromised HBGary Federal’s website, changing the main page to the Anonymous logo. The site also featured a note proclaiming that Anonymous shouldn’t be screwed with. Working with a number of strategies, they then disrupted HBGary Federal’s phone system and pulled more than fifty thousand communications from their messaging system.

They crafted a searchable repository of these email addresses on the internet, and uploaded a URL that leads to the hacked email addresses that were posted from Aaron Barr’s Twitter page. The email messages also presented some astonishingly disturbing details about the organization, including its plans to damage WikiLeaks through hacks. In addition to this, Aaron Barr’s hacked messages mentioned that the law firm responsible for organizing the Anti-WikiLeaks campaign, had also secretly worked for the United States government. The name of the law firm: Hunton & Williams.

The hack eventually led to a state examination of a number of other individuals that were active in the scandal, which led to Aaron Barr’s surrender.

If you would like to read a detailed article about Cybergate, please click here.

FEDERAL ATTACK (2012)

At the beginning of 2012, the FBI terminated MegaUpload, an organization that managed file hosting solutions on internet sites including MegaVideo; they were shut down because of the copyrights violation. As a consequence, a number of MegaUpload employees ended up behind bars. In response to this, Anonymous promptly impaired the Department of Justices’ website, and took down the online presence of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry of America – both of which happen to be the two most secretive and most powerful media lobbies in the capital of the United States.

If you would like to read a detailed article about the Federal Attack, please click here.

Source: Hackread

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