The loosely organized internet vigilante group Anonymous has come out in support of free speech by announching that they’re taking on Islamic fundamentalists in the wake of the deadly Charlie Hebdo attacks. The activists uploaded to the group’s Belgian YouTube account, a figure wearing the group’s Guy Fawkes mask and a hood says in French in an electronically-distorted voice: ‘We are declaring war against you, the terrorists.’
They add that the group will track down and close all accounts on social networks related to terrorists in order to avenge those who have been killed. This is backed up with a statement entitled “a message to the enemies of freedom of expression” posted to Pastebin, the hacker collective offered their condolences to “the families of the victims of this cowardly and despicable act”.
They write “freedom of expression has suffered inhuman assault … and it is our duty to react”.
Anonymous appears to have already claimed their first victim, albeit a small one. The group claimed on Saturday to have hacked the website ansar-alhaqq.net on Saturday afternoon. In 2013, French newspapers described it as a French jihadist website. Ansar-alhaqq.net was down for more than an hour after Anonymous’ announcement, but had returned online at the time of this writing. It’s unclear how the hackers were able to take down the site, but Anonymous’ usual weapon of choice is a cyberattack known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which consists of flooding a website with traffic. This kind of attack is not particularly sophisticated, and there are even off-the-shelf tools that allow almost anyone to mount something similar, according to security experts.
