Do you remember where you were when a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack brought down the Church of Scientology website?
No? What about when PayPal went under attack?
Still nothing?
These attacks were perpetrated by the decentralized hacktivist collective Anonymous, and you probably don’t remember them because unlike terrorist attacks, they didn’t cause you anything more than an inconvenience.
Anonymous is a loosely-affiliated group of computer programmers that organizes itself to coordinate online protests. Its methods include DDOS attacking websites, hacking into organizations’ servers and leaking documents. But Anonymous hasn’t once used its capabilities to physically harm another human being or the general public.
So why is the United States government lumping the group in with the likes of al-Qaida and foreign cyber spies?
A report in The Wall Street Journal last week stated that the National Security Agency is treating the online collective as a potential threat. NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander told officials that Anonymous may soon be able to “bring about a limited power outage through a cyber