ANONYMOUS
Anonymous is a collective of hacktivists and script kiddies which originated in 2003 on the website 4chan. In the traditional sense, it is more of a cyber-mob than an advanced persistent threat; however, the group’s construction and global membership afford it significant influence and resilience to law enforcement efforts. The group has established a brand name with the physical weight of a cohesive advanced persistent threat group. The group has a decentralized command structure and it unties its members through anarchic ideology. Essentially, the loosely affiliated members or member groups work towards goals that they agree upon or remain inactive or split off, if they do not agree. Dissent is common within the group and one of the largest difficulties in profiling Anonymous is that the only absolutely unifying characteristic is membership in the group. Some members participate to deface websites and prank organizations while other members participate because Anonymous affords them a serious political activism platform. Most of the members support the foundational anti- censorship and anti-control platform and they target entities accused of censoring the people. Members, Anons, range from non-technical supporters to active blackhat hackers. Essentially, if an individual believes in the Anonymous cause or simply says that they are a member, then they are part of the collective. The group members are told to neither reveal their identity or to discuss the group. The sense of membership and ease of access has allowed a few skilled hackers in Anonymous to hide amongst massive crowds of protesters.
The group began by attacking the Church of Scientology, but its scope rapidly expanded. Since then, the group has protested mass surveillance, anti-digital privacy efforts, governments, financial institutions, and individual users. More specifically, the group has targeted the MPAA, the RIAA, Sony, the Church of Scientology, the Westburo Baptist Church, government entities in the United States, Canada, Israel, Tunisia, and Uganda, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and child smuggling and child prostitution rings. Anonymous supported the Occupy movement against large businesses, and it supported the Arab Springs movement against oppressive regimes in the Arab region. The media is the only sector that Anonymous members are prohibited from targeting.
Anonymous defaces websites and organizes distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). Hacked websites may feature the pivotal picture of the Guy Fawkes mask, it may feature a manifesto claiming responsibility for the attack, or it may simply display an internet meme. DDoS attacks are conducted with Gigaloader, JMeter, or the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) applications. These tools flood a server with inbound TCP or UDP packets. Botnets belonging to members of the group are often added to DDoS campaigns. In some attacks, these botnets account for up to 90% of the malicious traffic.