War! - On the Net

What a gigantic mess today. News broke late in the afternoon that Mastercard website was taken down by a group of, what the media are calling, "hacktivists" (i.e. activist hackers). Anon Operation called out to the world, and they responded in force to join in the DDoS attack on Mastercard. Not long after, another trumpet call went out to take down Visa.com, which also went the way of an "HTTP error 408."

So this is war. A lot of it has been based on Twitter, and they were quick to deactivate the account of Anon Operation (which has reincarnated within a matter of minutes as: @Anon_Operationn). Facebook closed down their page. But what does a trumpet call from the people to take up arms against evil corporations look like? Well... like this:

CURRENT TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: WEAPONS http://bit.ly/e6iR3X ::: SET YOUR LOIC TO --> irc.anonops.net & FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! #WIKILEAKS #DDOS

It is so easy to join up and immediately feel a sense of belonging, not to mention the results were tremendous and very rapid. That's why so many people signed up when Anon Operations called out. What an amazing case study for the future. And all of this, just one day after Julian Assange of Wikileaks got arrested by UK authorities over an international arrest warrant issued by Sweden. Several companies severed ties with Wikileaks, including Mastercard and Visa and others like PayPal. This clarion call from Anon Operations launches a successful revenge attack against companies they deem to be aiding the censoring of free speech.