The hacker collective, known for attacking financial and government Web sites around the world and exposing details of individuals who engage in untoward online activity, says it will “shut the Internet down” on 31 March.
This mammoth move, says loosely-knit hacktivist group Anonymous, is to “protest SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act), Wall Street, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun”.
A recent Pastebin entry, purportedly by Anonymous, outlines the group's plot to disable the HTTP Internet in detail, labelling the initiative “Operation Global Blackout”. In order to shut down the Web as we know it, says the post, the “13 root DNS servers of the Internet” must come down.
“By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web.” The group says anybody entering http://www.google.com or any other URL, will get an error page, and consequently “they will think the Internet is down, which is close enough”.
The group offers a consolatory statement, that it is not trying to “kill” the Internet, but merely shut it down temporarily, “where it hurts the most”, and goes on to say there will be measures in place to “slow down those who will try to stop the attack”.
“It may only last one hour, maybe more, maybe even a few days. No matter what, it will be global. It will be known.”
This latest predetermined threat comes in the wake of at least two other warnings that Anonymous would take down social media giant Facebook, in November last year and, more recently, last month. Neither of these forewarnings came to fruition, with the global hacktivist group claiming threats were originated by rogue members.
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