One could say it all started when WikiLeaks a series of U.S. diplomatic cables. These are documents containing information about our government that were supposed to be secret. Shortly after the release of these documents, the WikiLeaks website was attacked, which prompted a move to Amazon for hosting. From there, things moved pretty fast. Amazon dropped WikiLeaks, which many say was under pressure from the State Department. WikiLeaks also lost their DNS and ended up moving to Switzerland.
This was not the end, though. MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others began denying service to WikiLeaks, tying up their finances. Upset by this turn of events, anonymous Internet users across the web decided to retaliate on behalf of WikiLeaks. Operation Payback, originally organized to protest the MPAA and RIAA, went back into effect. This is an organized group of anonymous Internet users with special software that allows them to coordinate attacks on any site of their choosing.
Operation Payback operatives primarily communicate via IRC, but have also set up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for communications. Many of these have been shut down by Facebook and Twitter, but seem to spring right back up elsewhere. In the same way that the documents released by WikiLeaks can never be scraped completely from the web, this group continues to spread and change.
Anonymous is not WikiLeaks, and the more famous whistle-blower does not seem to be pulling the strings. Nor, in fact, does anyone. At any point, anybody can show up in one of several IRC conversations and make a case for a target. Whoever else is there registers a vote, or an argument.
While the attacks are organized, there really isn’t much organization to the Anonymous group itself. The closest thing to leaders are a group of around 10 OPs who are the ones with access to the big red buttons, but they don’t necessarily direct the group’s actions.
About ten people, called “OPs”, are able to launch an attack. If any OP abuses his power—if he fails to heed what anons call “the hive mind” in IRC conversations— the other OPs can lock him out of the chat. If any anon fails to be inspired by the target, she can remove her own computer from the volunteer botnet, reducing its effect. Anonymous is a 24-hour Athenian democracy, run by a quorum of whoever happens to be awake. It’s hard even to define Anonymous as a “group”, since not all members participate in all projects.
The group seems to wield a lot of power on the Internet as many prominent sites have faced downtime or outages once the hive mind set its sites on them. Regardless of their individual motivations, this group is no joke. Even if some entity wanted to stop them, who could they go after?
more at The Economist