Anonymous Group Attacks Egyptian Websites, says Report

By Justin Lee, January 26, 2011  

An image promoting Anonymous' Operation: Egypt campaign

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Members of the Anonoymous group, a group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers, launched on Monday its Operation: Egypt campaign, where it began recruiting participants to the #OpEgypt channel on its IRC network, according to a report by Web analytics firm Netcraft.

The move is the latest in a series of attacks organized by the group, which is comprised of volunteers who install and run the Low Orbit Ion Cannon software to overwhelm a website with a large volume of traffic.

Last month the group launched attacks against PayPal, MasterCard and Visa. On Tuesday evening, Twitter announced on its status page that it had been blocked in Egypt after some of Anonymous' earlier DDoS attacks used Twitter feeds to announce targets to the automated attack software.

Anonymous' current target appears to be The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (http://www.mcit.gov.eg/).

Though it is unclear how many volunteers are a part of this attack, www.mcit.gov.eg appears to be up and running according to Netcraft's performance data, which could be a sign that the number of volunteers participating in the attacks has seen a gradual decline over the past few months.
A look at the group's IRC channel shows that it is currently recruiting individuals to use a web-based version of the LOIC attack tool, which can also be deployed through mobile phones.

Additionally, discussions about other targets to attack can be found on multi-user PiratePad site, which lists www.moiegypt.gov.eg as a main target-- a site that has recently seen some short outages.

Article Source : http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ permitted republishing here
repblished at http://webhostingdomainblognews.blogspot.com/