Anonymous Goes On Guy Fawkes Day Offensive

Loose hacktivist collective Anonymous has targeted various websites and businesses across the world as part of an annual operation launched around 5 November, Guy Fawkes Day, including a march on Trafalgar Square.

The campaign, known as OpVendetta, builds on the groups’ purported values of civil liberty and Web security – two concepts that can seem to be at odds with each other. The Guy Fawkes mask featured in the group’s logos and publicity derives from the anti-establishment comic strip, and subsequent film, V for Vendetta, which uses themes from the Gunpowder Plot narrative.

Guy Fawkes Day attacks

Anonymous has claimed some significant scalps in the build up to today, including Symantec and PayPal. Details on what appear to be almost 30,000 PayPal accounts were leaked online, although the page where they were dumped has now been removed.

There are reports a Symantec database has been compromised, yet a non-Anonymous hacker known as Doxbin has taken credit for the hit. According to Hacker News, a database from a Symantec online portal was leaked, including information such as emails, passwords and phone numbers.

Both PayPal and Symantec are now carrying out investigations, but have not seen evidence of successful attacks as yet.

“Security of our customers’ data is the top priority at PayPal. We’re aggressively investigating this but to date we have been unable to find any evidence that validates this claim,” a PayPal spokesperson said.

“Symantec is aware of the claims being made online.  We take each and every claim very seriously and have a process in place for investigating each incident.  Our first priority is to make sure that any customer information remains protected.  We are investigating these claims and have no further information to provide at this time. ”

Meanwhile, websites belonging to news provider NBC and a Lady Gaga fansite have been defaced by Anonymous hackers. Various NBC sites were hit by a hacker calling themselves ‘pyknic’, who also took credit for the strike on Gaga Daily.

They left the message: “Remember, remember the fifth of November. The gunpowder treason and plot.”

A Facebook group has indicated as many as 5,500 will march in London this evening as part of Operation Vendetta. At 8pm, thousands have committed to “march on The Houses of Parliament peacefully and unarmed”. They are due to gather in Trafalgar Square at 6pm.

“This is the centrepiece of a worldwide Anonymous operation of global strength and solidarity, a warning to all governments worldwide that if they keep trying to censor, cut, imprison, or silence the free world or the free internet they will not be our governments for much longer. Change is coming,” a message on the Facebook group read.

Anonymous recently claimed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on major banking institution HSBC, and pledged to attack gaming firm Zynga.

UPDATE: PayPal got in touch with TechWeekEurope to note that there was no evidence it was breached, but another hosting site, ZPanel, was the alleged victim. “The 28,000 passwords belonged to ZPanel, a free open source hosting site,” a spokesperson said.

Anuj Nayar, a PayPal spokesman, said the payments company had been investigating the attack since Sunday night and concluded there was no evidence its data had been stolen.

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