Anonymous Pledges Zynga Attacks In Banned YouTube Video

Troubled gaming firm Zynga has become the latest target of hacktivist collective Anonymous, but the controversial group’s YouTube video promoting the campaign has been banned.

Anonymous plans to release confidential information from Zynga on 5 November as part of Op MaZynga, which is ostensibly a response to “outrageous” treatment of employees.

Zynga announced plans to lay off 150 employees last week and shut down a number of its offices, as it looks to make savings of between $15 and $20 million.

A real threat to Zynga?

The operation launched today, according to a post on Anonnews.org, claimed the key to Zynga data files would be published on Guy Fawkes Night. The group also pledged to release Zynga games into the wild for free, but failed to say how it would do so.

“We have come to believe that this actions of Zynga will result in massive layoff of a thousand people and legal actions against everyone that speaks to the public about this plan,” the message read.

“With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behaviour of corporations like Zynga must change.”

The post was accompanied with what Anonymous claimed was a “leaked strategy” transcript from Zynga. It is widely doubted that this is anything of the sort, as it is conspicuously peppered with grammatical mistakes typical of Anonymous writings.

“Following the preliminary announced of this week the final strategy for the next two quarters has been successfully set to delivery by november 23 an additional but of 800 jobs with further raising of new capital from the market to support businesses,” the messsage read.

Anonymous also said it was going after Facebook – something it has done before, but without ever having any clear successes in disrupting the social network.

The new campaign has already had a setback, from a publicity perspective at least, as YouTube has removed a video posted on behalf of Op MaZynga – stating that the clip violated the video site’s policy on “depiction of harmful activities”.

Zynga told TechWeekEurope it was not commenting on the matter. At the time of publication, YouTube had not responded to a request for comment.

Zynga recently announced plans for expansion in the UK, forming a deal with gambling operator bwin.party to offer real money online poker and casino games.

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