Anonymous Shifts On Wikis Strategy, Announces It With A Press Relse

The Internet vigilante group Anonymous has been thrust into the spotlight this week as the Wikis story continues to erupt like a media volcano. So like any group at center of a story would do, Anonymous has put out (yes) a press relse outlining the motivations behind the attacks on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa and implying a change in strategy after attacks on Amazon never materialized.
“We do not want to stl your personal information or credit card s. We also do not seek to attack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our current goal is to raise awareness about Wikis and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair Wikis’ ability to function.”
Thus far Operation Payback has orchestrated DDoS attacks on the corporate sites of companies deemed enemies of Wikis after it started relsing thousands of diplomatic cables over Thanksgiving weekend.
The Anonymous tivist group behind Operation Payback had its main Twitter account and Facebook pages taken away on Wednesday and has since the been decentralized in its social media efforts.This however didn’t stop one of the splinter accounts from tweeting out the below relse, stating that the group essentially did not want to injure the companies targeted, but in fact wanted to “raise awareness.”
“While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in aDDoS attack, this is not the only rson the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertised in the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel thrtened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.
The continuing attacks on PayPal are alrdy tested and preferable: while not damaging their ability to process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people tonotice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.”While the logic here is inconsistent (don’t people also use Paypal and Mastercard to buy presents for their loved ones?) the relse hints at a kinder tler Anonymous afraid of (yes) bad press. If so that would explain this further evidence of a more positive pivot, a mission statement asking group members to cull the most interesting parts of the Wikis cables and republish — An action which, granted, does sprd more awareness than the firing of a LOIC cannon.

Source: Tech Crunch