Who are Anonymous

Recently on Habré the name Anonymous more often slips. However, in almost all cases, there is a misunderstanding of the ideology, structure and methods of work of Anonymus. I will try to clarify some elementary things.

Organization

Anonymous is an ideology, not a group of people, as most news writers assume. Followers of this idea are fighting for the general availability of information, against the oppression of freedoms by governments and corporations, against corruption, and against any other manifestations of society that some of this society does not approve of.

There are no leaders or representatives in Anonymous, no one can speak for everyone. In Anonymous, everyone is equal. This is a kind of anarchic Web 2.0 society. Of course, sometimes there are users with elevated rights, but this is just a sign of distinction of the technical staff who are working to maintain communication sites.
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Anyone can become Anonymous, regardless of their skills or experience. To do this, simply join the operation of interest to you, or create your own. Agree, to launch LOIC , or just to distribute information, everyone can.

The rules for participants are simple: stay anonymous and protect the anonymity of others.

Operations

Such an organizational structure has its pros and cons: the idea cannot be arrested, but how then can we distinguish the true sources from the fake ones (did they mention this “vulnerability” on Defcon)? The answer is simple: no way; it does not need to do. After all, if you see a good idea for an operation, it does not matter who submitted it. Anyone can right now create a VKontakte group, in which he will call to make a DDoS attack on Mikhalkov's sites, and this can be called a full-fledged operation Anonymous. Of course, for its recognition and implementation you need like-minded people.

There are operations that are not supported by the majority. For example, #opBART is a small group of independent Anonymus who want to hack hacked bart.gov and whether to publish personal information of citizens.

There are unsuccessful operations. For example, #opFacebook - an attempt to draw attention to the problems of information security when using Facebook. The reasons for its failure can be found in the blog gawker'a (eng).

If you have a problem, go ahead, call everyone on IRC , create the #opVkontakte channel and develop an action plan to kill Durov . How many times on Habré have you heard calls for Anonymous? How many times have people complained that Anonymous is not paying attention to us? Remember, these are appeals to yourself, take and act, seek the support of like-minded people! And inaction is an indicator of our social consciousness.

Anonymous - not LulzSec

These are completely different things: LulzSec is cracked just because they can, but Anonymous pursues some goal dictated by the needs of people. To compare these two concepts is about how to put Robin Hood and Kevin Mitnick in the same row (the latter was hacking for his own pleasure).

Debriefing

Open the search for Habr and see 2 pages of posts about Anonymous. Let's go through them:

• Anonymous hacked the site of the railway company BART
  From the very first line, the idea is called a team of hackers, in fact, this is done by supporters of the operation #opBART. Most did not support it because of the need for data leakage of innocent citizens.
• Anonymous posted in the network 5 GB of data on the Brazilian government
  I agree with that, but you should understand that Anonymous should be understood as “unknowns”.
• Hackers from the Anonymous group promised to "destroy" Facebook
  A deep mistake, they just wanted to draw public attention to the problem: to be more careful in handling information and to encourage people to delete their accounts. Proof (eng).
• Anonymous got to the secret documents of NATO
  I’ll clarify: they don’t have their own twitter, there can be a great many of such twitter followers, and each person has an individual behind them.
• Anonymous will launch their own social network
  It looks more like a fake, AnonPlus is not even in the list of operations. (Later it turned out that it was a stuffing from a separate group of people.)
• Hackers stole email addresses of 90 thousand US military
  Hacker (from the English. Hack - cut) - an extremely qualified IT specialist, a person who understands the very basics of computer systems.
• Anonymous launched HackerLeaks.tk to dump hacking information
  Commander X is not a leader, but a particularly active participant.
• 2 button accordions about Sony.
• AnonPlus again.

Etc., and the "defeated" Alizar and Marks, who told about the arrest of non-existent leaders Anonymous. Rays hate you guys.

Popular sources

• Twitter: @AnonOps (from Anonymous Operations), @AnonyOps , @YourAnonNews , @AnonymousIRC , @GroupAnon .
• anonops.blogspot.com
• IRC

PS: Thank Shedal for proofreading.