Anonymous is a meme that I think has been wielded by different groups at different times. There is no "official" anonymous and all it takes to join is to think to yourself "I am anonymous". If some of the reports of hacks coming out of the war zone and surrounding areas are true (such as tweet claiming Belarussian rail had been disrupted) then I suspect that Western state actors are using the meme right now.
While I’m no expert, this comment most accurately captures my suspicion: it is just a flag flown by various groups at various times as a sort of digital cover.
In these times, it could be said that anyone clicking one of those links to DDoS a Russian state website is “Anonymous”.
Still others may be governmental entities (CIA has been suggested) flying the anonymous flag to cover separate attacks.
In other times, it could be a group taking down Xbox LIVE for “lolz”.
Exactly this - the Guy Fawkes mask is the modern Jolly Roger. Sometimes you cheer for the pirates, sometimes they raid a ship you think doesn't deserve it. And sometimes state sponsored groups use it for cover.
> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective?
Always has been. Wikipedia is pretty thorough[0]. Anonymous arose from 4chan, and while subgroups have certainly organized (of which Lulzsec is probably most notable), the "Anonymous" moniker is used by the folks who frequent(ed) 4chan, Something Awful, YTMND -- it was never a stable group, never had a leader. It's just whoever was around at the time and felt like joining in (... often, for the lulz).
A majority of "participants" were script kiddies - downloading tools someone else wrote, naive DDoS attacks, and things of that nature. But there were also some who really knew their shit.
They were coopted for political interests over a decade ago, and so any organic interest moved on. Now they are used as boogyman, as a honey pot or as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys".
Mainly this started on the 4Chan image board because you could do anonymous posting of content. Then it moved forward doing various other hacking / social culture jamming or mainly just trolling people.
There was a hacker group several years ago that had some major hacks in their day.
But then they kind of fizzled out after the arrests of their leaders, with dozens of people arrested for involvement. With many of the big names in the group arrested, the rest broke away and disappeared, doing whatever they do now.
However, the name still had impact and popularity, so grifters set up Twitter news channels, claimed to members, blah blah blah. It's like "Dread Pirate Roberts" now.
I think some of PR/decision making personas are probably "in charge" there, to define next goals for the collective, but then hackers itself are just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place.
> just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place.
Only if they are on the your side or agree with what you think. One day they are on your side and the next day they aren't.
If they breach and leak data from a company they don't like, they don't care about the collateral damage or the innocent users getting caught in the crossfire, they just move on to the next target or the villain of the week.
The nature of anarchist hacktivist groups is that they are on no-one's side.
It's generally perceived to be autonomous and without central leadership, and I think at this point it largely is. Any PR efforts could just be independent efforts and whoever wants to follow along does. Originally though I think it was a lot more like "project mayhem" with centralized leadership that created this beast.
I've been involved with various factions of these communities for over 20 years. I can tell you that that books gets more wrong than it gets right. It's also heavily grinding a political axe.
I just checked out some reviews and apparently the author didn't even bother to try and contact Lowtax. If one were to write a book about Something Awful, the only way that's not step one is because you got the idea today.
There are certainly takes mixed with facts and the takes don't always agree with my observations, but I think on the whole the pictures painted are the correct shape.
In a completely hypothetical, imaginary, (not our) world,
Anynomous was just a bunch of wanna be hackers who could only use scripts and such. They had some talent that could write scripts but mostly for denial of service etc.
As luck would have it, some highly skilled band of people decided to use the Anonymous philosophical movement to push their own agenda forward. Thus lulzsec [0] was born and from within the anonymous ranks performed a series of hacks that got anonymous more attention then it knew what to do with.
Lulzsec were also claiming[1] to be forwarding the philosophy of anti-sec[3]. But in this hypothetical world, anti-sec was anti attention. They believed getting media attention, white hat hacking, publishing etc all lead to reduced exploits for them to use and more unwanted attention they wanted to avoid. This might have gotten them more attention than from just law enforcement. Rumor had is that it was Teamp0isoN [3] that leaked some information about lulzsec to law enforcement. At least some supposed members of that group were claiming such (on random irc) before the bust of lulzsec was announced.
But in honestly, there were dozens of different irc servers at some point that all claimed to be Anonymous. Because it was supposed to be some type of hivemind, there wasn't any one place that could claim authority. Before their lulzsec stuff, the appear in zines for various groups like h0n0, zfo, el8 where they get mentioned as `scriptkiddies` and exploits of their servers getting owned is presented as entertainment for anyone reading it [4].
Hopefully this is at least entertaining if completely fictional. Some things are very hard to know/verify as an outsider looking in.
Don't trust anyone on Twitter who claims to be Anonymous. The original Anonymous got coopted by the rival group Pseudonymous who just use their name and fame for publicity.
I see a lot of people calling random people pro Russian for saying anything that goes against the status quo. It has been happening since around 2016. Basically if you didn't vote for a Democrat it meant that people everywhere were calling you Russians.
Also, if you did any minor research about the CIA, even reading Wikipedia articles about the various operations they've been involved in, the idea of them coopting a hacker group isn't far fetched. If you want proof, then they wouldn't be Anonymous anymore would they?
Can you please make your substantive points without fulminating and calling names? It sounds like you know something about this topic, but if you post in this way, none of us get to benefit from what you know. It would be much better to share real information and leave out the putdowns, so the rest of us can learn.
Meanwhile from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30501144 ("oh fuck off"), all we're going to get is a jammed discussion that's high on indignation and low on information. This doesn't do anyone any good, and it contributes to destroying this place, which is fragile (particularly right now).
The thing to understand is that discussions on a large, open forum like HN simply go straight to the toilet when people start telling each other to fuck off (and I'm not saying you weren't provoked). Smaller technical forums sometimes have a pugnacious culture that can survive this kind of thing and actually get more interesting as people challenge one another, etc., but all that goes out the window when the commenting population is as large as it is here. All it does is open the floodgates for the next round of comments which will be even more nasty and also don't actually know anything. This is not in any of our interests.
The rules on HN are designed to help interesting discussion survive such conditions. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking that to heart, we'd be grateful.
If anyone is interested in a more in-depth explanation, here is a long exchange I had with another user last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. The point is that the rules on HN aren't trying to solve a moral problem (don't say bad things) but rather an optimization problem (how to sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck). I think that understanding this can make them seem less smarmy. At least I hope it can.
So are you objecting only to me responding to personal attacks with “fuck off” or is there something else too?
As far as I see it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my top level comment. It contains more substance than almost all other comments here, and referring to people exploiting a war for twitter followers as “idiots” is hardly inappropriate.
No, I'm objecting to the fulminating (indignant ranting) and name-calling in your comments generally. That kind of thing is against the site guidelines for good reason: it contributes to destroying this place for any sort of thoughtful conversation.
If you feel that your own fulminating and name-callings are higher-quality than that of others, ok - but you should realize that it still evokes worse from others and thus has a negative expected value.
Are you suggesting Russian intelligence took down their own sites? It hasn't been used to justify counterattacks, so I don't see what the benefit would be.
Please pardon the question because your higher comment seemed to imply this line of logic.
Speculation of the identity of Anonymous doesn't do much because it's an unfalsifiable framework no matter what the claim is. Even higher you said that the people taking down the sites and Anonymous twitter accounts were not the same. They likely are the same because they use the same branding. Whether or not the person behind the screen is a government operative is a separate question subject to speculation (that I am not disputing).
> They likely are the same because they use the same branding.
This is completely wrong. You will find all of these things claimed by many “Anonymous” accounts run by different people with zero connections between each other.
You severely underestimate how popular this hobby is.
I absolutely agree with this, I'm utterly astounded that it's been 14 years since Project Chanology and people are still baited by the whole "Anonymous" imagery.
Even if it was ever a particular group of people, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone claiming to be "Anonymous" in the last decade because being associated with a high profile name is bad news for a black hat hacker.
Others have pointed out that anonymous have defaced Russian websites. It's hard to fake that.
It seems like you have some old ties to various groups that called themselves anonymous, and you're upset with them for some reason. But they're still doing what they can to assist. I don't think it's too productive to say they're bullshit, especially when we can see they're having an effect.
It’s not my fault that you are not capable of critical thinking.
I guess Guccifer 2.0 was also a Romanian cab driver and not Russian intelligence services?
Western intelligence services defacing Russian websites have nothing to do with the majority of content associated with “Anonymous”, they’re deliberately throwing it in to muddy attribution and you’re eating it right up.
> But they're still doing what they can to assist.
“They” don’t exist. “They” cannot possibly be doing anything to assist.
Originally “Anonymous” was mostly a 4chan meme, a loose collective of internet trolls doing nasty things for laughs.
Later it was co-opted by the “Moralfags” i.e. people motivated by various moral causes who attracted tons of clueless people and drove away the real hackers.
