Anonymous Declares War On ISIS Following Paris Attacks
Hacker collective vows to ‘hunt down’ ISIS and begins shutting down Twitter accounts professing support for Islamic State
Anonymous has begun an online campaign against Islamic State following the terrorist attacks in Paris last week.
The activist group released a video on Saturday promising to “hunt down” Islamic State members and supporters who spread their message over the Internet as part of its Operation Paris, or ‘OpParis’.
Anonymous says it has been tracking the online activity of Islamic State group supporters for some time as part of a campaign to expose and shut down Twitter accounts used by the group to communicate and spread its message globally.
And according to the OpParis Twitter account, the group has already successfully taken over 2250 pro-ISIS Twitter accounts offline.
‘Biggest operation’
“Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down. You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go. We will launch the biggest operation ever against you,” the video, which was originally released in French, before being taken down and replaced with an English-language version.
In a change from Anonymous’ normal tactics of launching distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks against targeted websites, OpParis will look to hack into the sites to steal valuable information and leak it online.
Anonymous is notorious for taking on organisations or groups that look to spread hateful messages, often successfully highlighting activities to the wider world.
Earlier this month, the group published the details of a thousand alleged KKK sympathisers as part of its #HoodsOff campaign, which it described as “a form of resistance” against racial violence. This marked the latest part of its campaign against the KKK, as in November 2014 the group launched a major cyberattack which included posting several messages on the KKK’s official Twitter feed, and taking control of another account affiliated with the Klan.
And in January this year Anonymous also claimed responsibility for disabling a France-based website it associated with extremists in the wake of the murder of journalists and artists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo.
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