Who is Anonymous?

Reports that members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement have defaced the website of Irish opposition party Fine Gael are being denied by … well, members of Anonymous.

The hack exposed details of 2,000 members of the party. But chatter within Anonymous IRC channels suggests that most people who identify themselves with Anonymous want to distance themselves from this action.

It’s a problem, though, isn’t it?

The whole point of Anonymous is that anyone can join. There’s no formal membership. You don’t have to register at a website. All you have to do to be a member is to say so. The movement prides itself on being amorphous, which makes it difficult to attack (though not impossible). It even tries to suggest it doesn’t have a leadership (which is a lie, but a discussion for another time).

So whoever the people were who attacked the Irish website have as much right to call themselves ‘Anonymous’ as anyone else.

However, there are some clues that this action wasn’t carried out by the kind of people who hang out in the usual Anonymous IRC channels. According to some reports, the hack was quite sophisticated. And the technical skill level of most Anons is pretty low. Most are little more than script kiddies, if that.

To give you an example: during the recent, high-profile attacks on PayPal et al, there was a hiatus during which there was no target defined. Anons were getting restless. Many visitors to the #operationpayback channel were desperate to attack something, anything. They wanted a target domain or IP to plug into their LOIC clients. Someone with a mean sense of humour and a little more knowledge than most suggested: “Attack 127.0.0.1”.

It was disheartening how many took this seriously. I suspect that a few had logged off IRC in the excitement of having a new victim, and didn’t see subsequent announcements that mounting a DDoS attack on your own machine might be a bad idea. It would have been fun to watch, though. They probably thought they’d brought down the entire Internet…