Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?<br />
A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, “Holy s— I’m really strong!”

[A Norwegian prosecutor said:] "We know Soca was recently attacked, as well as Norwegian and American sites, and that is one of the things that we are looking into."</p><p>

Norway's National Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) said the sites had been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which large amounts of data were sent to the owner's servers in an attempt to overwhelm them.</p><p>

It added that the 18- and 19-year-olds were charged at the end of last week following electronic attacks over a period lasting "several weeks". The offence carries a maximum sentence of six years in jail.

Nobody in technology, nor in business, for that matter, can get away from fighting Anonymous or other similar groups, whether the fight transpires in media or anywhere else, [hacker "Jericho"] said.</p><p>

So that's why they care, and why we must. Beyond our own, personal involvement, a broader concern is that much of what we lay at the Anonymous doorstep may be branded as such merely as a smokescreen.</p><p>

As Corman noted, this amorphous thing we call "Anonymous" has become the perfect scape goat. Anonymous members continually drop in and out of affiliation with, or actions taken on behalf of, the group.

As to the various stunts [Sabu] pulled in the months since his arrest - including but not limited to the unnecessary release of credit card information for Stratfor customers - we may never know to what extent such things were encouraged by his "Justice Department" handlers in an effort to discredit this movement. But I digress, lol. At any rate, the Feds came back a couple of hours later with a search warrant for my mom's place - they fully intended to take a certain laptop, and did.

There has been no indication thus far that Monsegur is a methodical criminal who has amassed a great fortune.  Nor has anyone suggested that he is a cyber-terrorist attacking entities that oppose his political or religious ideology (though time will tell).  Instead, the data at hand would suggest that chaos, in and of itself, is the reward he seeks—busting things up, bringing them down, causing people to suffer as the structure they rely upon to organize their thoughts and intentions dissolves.

criminal defense lawyers for those accused hackers are no doubt poring over [Sabu's] communications with their clients, and looking for evidence of entrapment: the defense that the U.S. government, with an influential member of Anonymous as their pawn, pushed hackers into the same illegal acts for which they’re now prosecuting them.

Months after Monsegur [Sabu's real name] began cooperating with law enforcement, his Twitter feed (with 45,000 followers) continued to rally his hacktivist “brothers” to attack governments and private corporate targets. A message he wrote in late December asked for fellow hackers to give him stolen documents so that they could be published under the banner of “Antisec,” the sub-movement against the security industry in which he was a vocal organizer. “Leakers, security researchers or hackers who have vulnerabilities or leaked docs contact us,” Monsegur wrote.

Last year, a group of hackers calling themselves Lulz Security (LulzSec for short) caught the internet's attention with a series of high-profile data breaches and website takedowns targeting the likes of Fox News, Sony and the US government, before apparently disbanding after 50 days of "lulz".

Throughout that period, the group's own website proved impervious to rival hacking attempts, thanks to an online security service called CloudFlare. Speaking to New Scientist in advance of his talks at the RSA conference and SXSW festival next month, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince explains why he kept the hackers online, and how attacks on their site have helped protect the internet.

The director of the National Security Agency has warned that the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.

The breach is a potential embarrassment for Luxembourg-based Manwin, which runs some of the world's best-known pornography websites.
A small sample of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of user data allegedly compromised were posted to the Internet earlier this week. E-mails, user names, and encrypted passwords were divulged, and in some cases it was possible to infer porn users' full names and country of origin.
The hacker claiming responsibility for the breach told the Associated Press that he carried out the attack to draw attention to the site's vulnerability.