Three of the top Anonymous leaders allegedly captured in Spain

http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/06/10/spain.hackers/index.html

by bry • 15 years ago

39 15 15 years ago

Typhon• 15 years ago

Anonymous has no leaders. Anonymous is not a hacker network. It may be that some people who belong to hacker networks use Anonymous as their name, but that doesn't involve Anonymous as a whole.

The reason Anonymous is called Anonymous, what makes it different from another human group is that anyone can be part of it, anyone can claim to represent it.

bry• 15 years ago

That's the theory, but in reality there are likely members that are more influential than others. Not official leaders perhaps, but a form of leader nonetheless.

scythe• 15 years ago

There are!

But Anonymous is kind of disjoint. It's feudal. You'll realize this if you try to hop on to one of the IRC networks -- there are a million different little channels each representing its own fiefdom. They mostly have some common beliefs, and they all fly the same banner -- but when one group rises to prominence they will often start doing things under their own name. Some recent examples include LulzSec and Goatse Security. There are also the people who run the websites and the IRC channels and who make the DDoS tools and similar skiddie stuff; these guys are by any measure the real "leaders" of the operation, but they prefer to sit on the sidelines and don't usually get their hands dirty. The argument could be made, for example, that Julian Assange is an unwitting leader of Anonymous.

It's an emergent structure, not an intentional one. This is key to its resilience.

I used to post regularly on /i/ a few years ago; it grew into the "Anonymous" of today after the website owner shut it down. There was a Fox News report about the "Anonymous" threat way back in 2007; the "informant" mentioned in the report is Alex Wuori, a self-proclaimed "defector", and I'm not exactly breaking his privacy because literally everyone knows who he is and what he did. The Fox News report centered on the /i/ board of the time.

The other thing about Anonymous is that it is, as you may have noticed, rather old, in Internet terms. The first true Anonymous raid was YTMND vs. Ebaums back in 2006, in which 4chan and 7chan ran DDoS attacks against ebaumsworld.com in retaliation for stolen content.

I don't do any of that anymore, in case anyone's wondering. Being 17 only lasts one year.

redstripe• 15 years ago

"The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."

Spain probably has a pretty rigorous internet/telephony monitoring aparatus as a result of it's internal terrorism problems, but I'm curious how they were tracked down after the wifi network was located. Did the police just search all nearby properties? Is there hardware that can locate the source of individual wifi broadcasts?

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

Any law enforcement authority is likely to have hardware for triangulating radio signals.

escanda• 15 years ago

They've already been released with charges. One of them hosted the IRC server in his own house.

They were not involved in the Playstation network attack but on national Spanish attacks to the Minister of Culture and some other local websites.

He, at least these last two weeks between the cucumbers crisis, and now this misunderstanding on the PSN, the focus is diverted from bonds speculation :)

getsat• 15 years ago

> a computer server that was used to coordinate and execute the attacks

lol, they arrested a kid with a laptop running LOIC. Nothing to see here, move along.

velutinous• 15 years ago

I think the term "leaders" is used very loosely here since last I checked they weren't an organisation with "leaders"

I think they're trying to put the blame on anonymous. They found this and thought, we'll blame it on them:

"police found a large quantity of software programs specifically designed to infect third-party computers. The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection at home, the police said."

click170• 15 years ago

I'm waiting for their response (Anonymous), it's usually comical and entertaining.

tomelders3• 15 years ago

Lol. They think they know what Anonymous is. Lawfags can't even triforce, etc etc....

tomelders3• 15 years ago

Minus points for satire? It's a good job HN doesn't run a country.

alnayyir2• 15 years ago

>Minus points for satire?

Yep. Be useful or move on.

voidr• 15 years ago

You can't just arrest the leaders of Anonymous, because it has no leaders, this is the whole point of it.

These goverment people fight back the only way they know: propaganda.

Three of the top Anonymous leaders allegedly captured in Spain

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