Anonymous has never been a well-run organization—it’s at its best and most fundamental when it isn’t really organized at all. That’s what used to make it so dangerous; thousands upon thousands of hiveminded hackers and hack-minded who would DDoS on command and break website security for the cause. Emerging from this mess was LulzSec, an elite and independent Delta Force of Anons, commanding respect among sympathizers and fear among corporations. They got things done—giant things, like embarrassing major credit cards, dumping gigantic data leaks like clockwork, and even knocking down the CIA’s website.
And then everyone went to prison.
Today, Anon lacks the talent and semi-cohesion it once boasted across the net, and its most recent online crusade is an embarrassing reminder. This is less a war than the hacker equivalent of egging someone’s house and then smoking weed behind a Denny’s.
When I was in training to become a young hacker, I was warned (well, I just read it somewhere, but my initial description is much more hackerish) to never try to hack government computers. The people running them weren’t the brightest on the block; but they could command unlimited money, time and resources to run any intruder to ground. And they don’t have to be the best at anything — they can bring in the hired guns (see above, “unlimited money”) who are.
As it turned out, it was all rather a moot point, as I turned out to have the hacking skills (or skillz, if you prefer) of your average turnip.
At any rate, I doubt the Israelis are very much worried about this gaggle of clueless script-kiddies. They are the folks, after all, who probably wrote the Stuxnet worm.
