OTTAWA — One year ago, three federal security agencies focused their eyes on Anonymous. One labelled the collective the modern face of hacktivism. Another warned Anonymous could soon have the ability to take down critical infrastructure such as water systems and the electricity grid. The reports were written at a time when it was easier to study and understand how members of the collective operated.
A year later, Anonymous members have gone deeper underground. The arrest of Jeremy Hammond, who faces life in prison for his alleged role in leaking credit card information and internal emails from security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., and the hacker-turned-informant Hector Xavier Monsegur, have forced hacker groups that form part of the Anonymous collective to become “more scattered and secretive,” said Gabriella Coleman, an international expert on Anonymous from McGill University.
“They’re the type of phenomena that can slip away, vanish and recede,” Coleman said. “On the other hand, everything is in place for other strong strings of attacks because it doesn’t take long to bring them (anons) into being.”
Information leaks and online activism, such as denial-of-service attacks to slow down or take down a website, are the actions that define Anonymous, Coleman said. Even though Canadian security agencies warned a year ago that Anonymous members could one day successfully target critical infrastructure and be a threat to national security, Coleman doesn’t see that prediction coming to fruition.
“I don’t think (Anonymous) is a threat. They’re not there to kill people,” said Coleman, who holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill.
“And I’m not so sure they have the capabilities for that either. In the general sense, it’s a threat from nation states and other organizations that can afford to do that. In some ways, if you’re protecting against them you’re protecting against Anonymous, but they’re not interested in (critical infrastructure).”
The prediction of infrastructure attacks from Anonymous is contained in a report from the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, which uses intelligence from the RCMP, among other agencies, to evaluate terrorist threats to Canada. That report, along with ones from CSIS and the country’s cyber spy organization, CSEC, were penned following a threat from Anonymous to delete Toronto from the Internet and take down the Toronto Stock Exchange after that city prepared to remove Occupy Toronto protesters in November 2011…..
Anonymous a threat to critical infrastructure? Expert says no!
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