Hacking group Anonymous has returned for George Floyd protests – or has it?

A protestor against the death of George Floyd wears a Guy Fawkes mask in Miami
A protestor against the death of George Floyd wears a Guy Fawkes mask in Miami

A decade ago, a series of high-profile cyber attacks hit Paypal, Sony and Visa. The culprits, symbolised only by a Guy Fawkes mask, described themselves as Anonymous, a loose group of hackers who first met on gaming message boards.

In the years that followed the group went largely silent. A series of FBI crackdowns, in which several people including Britons were arrested, sent Anonymous off the map.

Then last week, as thousands walked the streets in anger over George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, social media accounts claiming to be operated by Anonymous said they had taken down the Minnesota police website. Hundreds of email addresses and passwords of police officers had been stolen, they claimed, which were later published online.

Meanwhile several Twitter accounts using variations of "Anon", and bearing the iconic Guy Fawkes face mask emblem, popped up and began to gather millions of followers between them.

A Twitter spokesperson said there appears to be no singular organisation pulling the strings. "There's no evidence of substantial coordinated activity with accounts related to Anonymous," the company said.

A protestor in Miami  - AP
A protestor in Miami - AP

"We have seen a few accounts change their profile names, photos, in an attempt to visibly associate with the group and gain followers."

Twitter has already suspended some users for attempting to operate fake "Anonymous" accounts.

While in the past Anonymous took responsibility for hijacking the Ferguson City Hall website after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, it now appears that opportunists are using the high profile name to ride off the coat tails of a social media buzz surrounding legitimate causes like Black Lives Matter and other civil rights groups against racial injustice.

After hearing of the hack on the Minnesota police, cyber security expert Troy Hunt ran the "stolen" police credentials through his data breach database and found that most of the information was already in circulation.

“These may well be legitimate Minnesota Police Department email addresses and the passwords may well have been used along with those email addresses on other systems,” Hunt wrote in a blog post.

“But they almost certainly didn't come from a police department system and aren't the result of the police department being 'hacked'.”

Hunt believes the faked breach gained traction simply because “emotions are high" and "public outrage is driving a desire for this to be true, even if it's not". Attributing it to Anonymous, "implies social justice, even if the whole thing is a hoax", he said.

Some of the accounts, like @YourAnonCentral and @YouAnonNews are currently being used to wage a war against the antagonistic hashtags #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter, and are encouraging others to use the hashtag to share pictures of Korean pop stars, Japanese-style cartoons and photographs of Taylor Swift in order to drown out messages from far right groups.

But several of Anonymous' original "members" are keeping a low profile after an FBI crackdown between 2010 and 2013, resulting in several charges for hacking offences.

Anonymous first spread on message boards like 4Chan, where gamers would coordinate DDoS attacks against private companies or organisations that users felt had wronged them in some way or were morally bankrupt. Many of the high profile cyber attacks were conducted by separate hacking groups, like Lulzsec or Lizard Squad.

A DDoS attack manipulates traffic to a website, flooding its servers until they fail with the intention of knocking the website or online service offline.

Anonymous' targets have included organisations like the Church of Scientology and the Ku Klux Klan, but also Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, which became targets after the financial services blocked Julian Assange's access to funds in relation to Wikileaks, and Sony, for suing young gamer George Hotz for jail-breaking his PS3 console.

But 10 years on and it appears the name has been hijacked to help boost the profile of social media accounts and troubling conspiracy theory videos on YouTube.

On Thursday, a verified YouTube account claiming to be run by Anonymous published an 11 minute, rambling diatribe from notorious British conspiracy theorist David Icke, which YouTube recently banned for sharing harmful coronavirus claims. Icke was also banned by Facebook.

The former sports commentator appears in a video warning that “technocrats”, not elected officials will take over by 2030 and that human brains “will be connected to AI”, adding that the Covid-19 pandemic will accelerate” mind control”. The video is filled with images of young people protesting while wearing face masks, but has no mention of George Floyd. YouTube did not comment.

As to who the real Anonymous is (or was), the mystery remains. As long as Anonymous has no face or leadership it will be near impossible to work out who is behind the movement - or if one truly exists.