UPDATED 14:43 EDT / FEBRUARY 13 2012

NEWS

Anonymous Busy Over Weekend Attacking CIA, Mexico, Greece, Alabama DHS Websites

It’s been an extremely busy weekend for Anonymous hactivist cells who have struck out at government and police websites across the globe.

On Friday, the website for the CIA was reported as having gone down. Multiple reports that it had gone down went out and even CNN verified that it had been taken offline. Asked about the outage, CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said Friday night, “We are aware of the problems accessing our website, and are working to resolve them.” Access to the site was returned early Saturday morning.

Friday saw tweets going out celebrating the crash of the CIA website with messages similar to: “CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous.”

Saturday, Anonymous cells went on to attack multiple websites across Alabama and Mexico according to the same CNN article.

“We are aware of the current situation regarding individual(s) claiming responsibility for hacking into a state of Alabama … public website,” Alabama Department of Homeland Security Director Spencer Collier said in a release. Forensic analysis of the information compromised is still pending from the DHS site hack.

Mexico’s mining ministry website appeared to be down Friday as tweets went out from well-known Anonymous associated Twitter accounts about files and e-mails allegedly taken from them. Tweets seemed to implicate the Mexican Chamber of Mines—and the Mexican mining ministry website, an organization distinct from the Mexican Chamber of Mines, appeared to be down that day as well.

Today Anonymous sets sights on Greece over political unrest

Mass protests and riots have broken out across Athens, Greece over an extremely unpopular bailout bill from the EU designed to save the country from bankruptcy. This has egged Anonymous into action to attack and deface Greek websites.

According to an article on The Next Web, reports are that Anonymous cells have taken down Greek websites pertaining to government and banking. The article cites Major TV channel, the Prime Minister’s website, National Police, the Ministry of Finance, and Minister of finance Evangelos Venizelos’ personal site. Just last week, Anonymous defaced the Greek Ministry of Justice website over the trade treaty ACTA.

Anonymous is well known for hitting government websites when they engage in oppression or censoring their populations. Recently they have hit the Central Intelligence Agency of the US and leaked embarrassing information from Syrian President Bashar Assad’s office. Cells of the hactivist group have hit Syria before, and Turkey, and many others during times of political unrest.

This is a continuing trend which we will be following. The politicization of hactivism from 2011 is likely to be a constant thread in 2012.


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