Étude du groupe Anonymous (document en anglais)

Anonymous is a loosely affiliated group of activist computer hackers who got their start years ago as cyberpranksters, an online community of tech-savvy kids more interested in making mischief than political statements.

But coordinated attacks on major corporate and government Web sites suggest that Anonymous has come of age, evolving into a group that is focused on more serious matters.

In January 2012, Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the United States Justice Department and several major entertainment companies and trade groups in retaliation for the seizure of Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet that allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. The Federal Bureau of Investigation charged seven people connected to Megaupload with running an international criminal enterprise centered on copyright infringement.

The following month, Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of a conference call between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies.

An F.B.I. official said Anonymous had not in fact hacked into the conference call or any other bureau facilities. Instead, the official said, the group had obtained an e-mail giving the time, telephone number and access code for the call. The e-mail had been sent on Jan. 13 to more than three dozen people at the bureau, Scotland Yard, and agencies in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden. One of the recipients, a foreign police official, evidently forwarded the notification to a private account, he said, and it was then intercepted by Anonymous.

In December 2010, Anonymous had waged a campaign of cyberattacks on the Web sites of multinational companies and other organizations that it deemed hostile to the WikiLeaks antisecrecy organization and its jailed founder, Julian Assange. Within 12 hours of a British judge’s decision to deny Mr. Assange bail in a Swedish extradition case, attacks on the Web sites of WikiLeaks’s “enemies” caused several corporate Web sites to become inaccessible or slow down markedly.

Targets of the attacks, in which activists overwhelmed the sites with traffic, included the Web site of MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; Amazon.com, which revoked the use of its computer servers; and PayPal, which stopped accepting donations for Mr. Assange’s group. Visa.com was also affected by the attacks, as were the Web sites of the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the lawyer representing the two women whose allegations of sexual misconduct were the basis of Sweden’s extradition bid.

In December 2011, the global geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor said that its data servers had been breached by Anonymous. The group posted online the names, e-mails and credit card numbers of thousands of Stratfor subscribers.

Two months later, Wikileaks said that it had begun to expose e-mail correspondence from Stratfor. It said the e-mails detailed the company’s work for clients, and that it was analyzing the documents with the help of numerous publications.

Wikileaks said that Stratfor kept many records on the group and its founder, Mr. Assange.

Arrests Made of Anonymous

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