How dangerous is Anonymous?

“The real threat comes from the professionals, rather than the volunteers who have access to tens of thousands of machines.”

While the Anonymous members made it clear they couldn’t speak for the whole group, they agreed that people with a variety of backgrounds take part.

“We have highly skilled ‘hackers’ with huge botnets and lots of knowledge, but there are also those who have seen the cause and got involved with very little knowledge of ‘hacking’,” a member of the group said, stressing “hacking” wasn’t really the right term. Another noted there’s a core group of 500 to 1000 that have such skills, while the rest are “just protesters”.

“These are just normal people who wish to stand up for what they believe in, and shouldn’t be referred to as hackers,” said another.

So is the goal to spark a cyberwar? “The DDoS attacks were neither an act of so-called ‘cyberwar’ or a sit-in, they were more of a wake-up call to the world, about the suppression of freedom of the press,” said one.

Regardless of motivation, DDoS attacks are illegal in Britain, and the Met Police are already investigating Anonymous, making five arrests in January. Sop warns that LOIC doesn’t – at the time of writing, at least – hide IP addresses, and his firm collects such identifying data in its logs.

"We give that information to law enforcement and people are going to be arrested. A lot of these kids probably are getting into the thrill of it without having the experience and knowledge that they’re actually committing a crime.”

Despite refocusing its efforts on spreading the leaked diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Anonymous has said that the attacks aren’t over. The day we spoke to Sop, his firm had defended customers against seven Anonymous attacks.

“They’re still doing it.”

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk