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Ask HN: Who Are Anonymous?

32 points by kertoip_1 5y ago

Now at least we know they are not backed by Russian government. But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective?

factorialboy 5y ago
CIAnonymous?
- wesleywt 5y ago
  Citation needed. I see plenty of pro Russian commenters saying this.
  - 3np 5y ago
    It's fully possible that US, Russia, DPRK, and other state actors have all acted under the name of "Anonymous".
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    I see a lot of people calling random people pro Russian for saying anything that goes against the status quo. It has been happening since around 2016. Basically if you didn't vote for a Democrat it meant that people everywhere were calling you Russians. Also, if you did any minor research about the CIA, even reading Wikipedia articles about the various operations they've been involved in, the idea of them coopting a hacker group isn't far fetched. If you want proof, then they wouldn't be Anonymous anymore would they?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
lukaszkups 5y ago
[personal opinion] I was asking myself the same question recently. I think some of PR/decision making personas are probably "in charge" there, to define next goals for the collective, but then hackers itself are just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place.
- twox2 5y ago
  It's generally perceived to be autonomous and without central leadership, and I think at this point it largely is. Any PR efforts could just be independent efforts and whoever wants to follow along does. Originally though I think it was a lot more like "project mayhem" with centralized leadership that created this beast.
- rvz 5y ago
  > just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place. Only if they are on the your side or agree with what you think. One day they are on your side and the next day they aren't. If they breach and leak data from a company they don't like, they don't care about the collateral damage or the innocent users getting caught in the crossfire, they just move on to the next target or the villain of the week. The nature of anarchist hacktivist groups is that they are on no-one's side.
slater 5y ago
They're legion.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  They do not forget. They do not forgive.
dncornholio 5y ago
> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective This is what it is, until proven otherwise
rosndo 5y ago
- d4ngmpreg 5y ago
  - rosndo 5y ago
    The truth, coming from someone who used to host these boards and ircs.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Even if it was ever a particular group of people, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone claiming to be "Anonymous" in the last decade because being associated with a high profile name is bad news for a black hat hacker.
- gokdisjtrdcvv5 5y ago
  Your last sentence is very confusing. Mind repeating it and explain what some of those words mean (eg “moralfags”)?
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Originally “Anonymous” was mostly a 4chan meme, a loose collective of internet trolls doing nasty things for laughs. Later it was co-opted by the “Moralfags” i.e. people motivated by various moral causes who attracted tons of clueless people and drove away the real hackers. This is a sort-of good source on the pre-anonops history of “Anonymous” https://archive.org/details/partyvan-wiki-20111223.7z https://archive.org/details/partyvan-wiki-20111223.7z
- jaynetics 5y ago
  Apparently some of these "pretending" hackers replaced the content of several Russian news websites (e.g. Kommersant) with anti war messages a few hours ago. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/handful-of-russian-media-websites-display-anti-putin-message-after-hack/47388722 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/handful-of-russian-media-websit...
pjbeam 5y ago
Anonymous is a meme that I think has been wielded by different groups at different times. There is no "official" anonymous and all it takes to join is to think to yourself "I am anonymous". If some of the reports of hacks coming out of the war zone and surrounding areas are true (such as tweet claiming Belarussian rail had been disrupted) then I suspect that Western state actors are using the meme right now.
- rosndo 5y ago
  The Belarusian hacks are by a group going by “cyber partisans”, completely irrelevant to this discussion.
- tyleo 5y ago
  While I’m no expert, this comment most accurately captures my suspicion: it is just a flag flown by various groups at various times as a sort of digital cover. In these times, it could be said that anyone clicking one of those links to DDoS a Russian state website is “Anonymous”. Still others may be governmental entities (CIA has been suggested) flying the anonymous flag to cover separate attacks. In other times, it could be a group taking down Xbox LIVE for “lolz”.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    Exactly this - the Guy Fawkes mask is the modern Jolly Roger. Sometimes you cheer for the pirates, sometimes they raid a ship you think doesn't deserve it. And sometimes state sponsored groups use it for cover.
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  Asking "who are anonymous" is like asking "who flies the jolly Rodger." It's useful given context but in general has no answer. In the context of the Ukraine conflict: Given that most of what I've seen anyway is 100% propaganda and no memes it's likely US government agents.
d4ngmpreg 5y ago
As with any hacktivist group that never hits TPTB where it would actually hurt, chances are they're CIA/similar.
throwawayay02 5y ago
They were coopted for political interests over a decade ago, and so any organic interest moved on. Now they are used as boogyman, as a honey pot or as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys".
- rosndo 5y ago
  Today it’s all about attention-seekers working to gather as many twitter followers as possible by pretending to be hackers. > as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys". If you consider Russian intelligence services to be the “good guys”, sure.
- itake 5y ago
  do you have links about this? Didn't they have a couple social media handles on twitter and yt?
  - rosndo 5y ago
    No. This was never a thing. A variety of grifters created fake “official” accounts like @youranonnews in order to enrich themselves.
posix_me_less 5y ago
In theory, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alone%20complex https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alon... In practice, it may be some controlled operation.
willis936 5y ago
Speculation as to what the entities claiming to be Anonymous now are should be informed by the history of Anonymous. I recommend the book "It Came From Something Awful". Along the way you'll be told the history of counterculture and why you feel despair.
- seneca 5y ago
  I've been involved with various factions of these communities for over 20 years. I can tell you that that books gets more wrong than it gets right. It's also heavily grinding a political axe.
  - bena 5y ago
    I just checked out some reviews and apparently the author didn't even bother to try and contact Lowtax. If one were to write a book about Something Awful, the only way that's not step one is because you got the idea today.
  - willis936 5y ago
    There are certainly takes mixed with facts and the takes don't always agree with my observations, but I think on the whole the pictures painted are the correct shape.
xdfg13345 5y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/834/ https://xkcd.com/834/
john-doe 5y ago
Anyone with a botnet.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
There was a hacker group several years ago that had some major hacks in their day. But then they kind of fizzled out after the arrests of their leaders, with dozens of people arrested for involvement. With many of the big names in the group arrested, the rest broke away and disappeared, doing whatever they do now. However, the name still had impact and popularity, so grifters set up Twitter news channels, claimed to members, blah blah blah. It's like "Dread Pirate Roberts" now.
busterarm 5y ago
Absolutely not Kirtaner. Even if he may possibly have access to a twitter account.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Someone that calls them self Anonymous. " I am anonymous" look I am part of it. Mainly this started on the 4Chan image board because you could do anonymous posting of content. Then it moved forward doing various other hacking / social culture jamming or mainly just trolling people.
ushakov 5y ago
Anonymous i knew of were 14 year olds with LOIC synced to IRC server
0x0000000 5y ago
> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective? Always has been. Wikipedia is pretty thorough[0]. Anonymous arose from 4chan, and while subgroups have certainly organized (of which Lulzsec is probably most notable), the "Anonymous" moniker is used by the folks who frequent(ed) 4chan, Something Awful, YTMND -- it was never a stable group, never had a leader. It's just whoever was around at the time and felt like joining in (... often, for the lulz). A majority of "participants" were script kiddies - downloading tools someone else wrote, naive DDoS attacks, and things of that nature. But there were also some who really knew their shit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)
pluc 5y ago
The CIA
blacksqr 5y ago
That's like asking what color is black.
itchyjunk 5y ago
In a completely hypothetical, imaginary, (not our) world, Anynomous was just a bunch of wanna be hackers who could only use scripts and such. They had some talent that could write scripts but mostly for denial of service etc. As luck would have it, some highly skilled band of people decided to use the Anonymous philosophical movement to push their own agenda forward. Thus lulzsec [0] was born and from within the anonymous ranks performed a series of hacks that got anonymous more attention then it knew what to do with. Lulzsec were also claiming[1] to be forwarding the philosophy of anti-sec[3]. But in this hypothetical world, anti-sec was anti attention. They believed getting media attention, white hat hacking, publishing etc all lead to reduced exploits for them to use and more unwanted attention they wanted to avoid. This might have gotten them more attention than from just law enforcement. Rumor had is that it was Teamp0isoN [3] that leaked some information about lulzsec to law enforcement. At least some supposed members of that group were claiming such (on random irc) before the bust of lulzsec was announced. But in honestly, there were dozens of different irc servers at some point that all claimed to be Anonymous. Because it was supposed to be some type of hivemind, there wasn't any one place that could claim authority. Before their lulzsec stuff, the appear in zines for various groups like h0n0, zfo, el8 where they get mentioned as `scriptkiddies` and exploits of their servers getting owned is presented as entertainment for anyone reading it [4]. Hopefully this is at least entertaining if completely fictional. Some things are very hard to know/verify as an outsider looking in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN [4] https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hackers/ https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hack...
janmarsal 5y ago
Don't trust anyone on Twitter who claims to be Anonymous. The original Anonymous got coopted by the rival group Pseudonymous who just use their name and fame for publicity.
bg117 5y ago
If you give them a name, they cease to be Anonymous. Is it not?

32 points by kertoip_1 5y ago

Now at least we know they are not backed by Russian government. But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective?

factorialboy 5y ago

CIAnonymous?

wesleywt 5y ago
Citation needed. I see plenty of pro Russian commenters saying this.
- 3np 5y ago
  It's fully possible that US, Russia, DPRK, and other state actors have all acted under the name of "Anonymous".
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I see a lot of people calling random people pro Russian for saying anything that goes against the status quo. It has been happening since around 2016. Basically if you didn't vote for a Democrat it meant that people everywhere were calling you Russians. Also, if you did any minor research about the CIA, even reading Wikipedia articles about the various operations they've been involved in, the idea of them coopting a hacker group isn't far fetched. If you want proof, then they wouldn't be Anonymous anymore would they?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

lukaszkups 5y ago

[personal opinion] I was asking myself the same question recently. I think some of PR/decision making personas are probably "in charge" there, to define next goals for the collective, but then hackers itself are just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place.

twox2 5y ago
It's generally perceived to be autonomous and without central leadership, and I think at this point it largely is. Any PR efforts could just be independent efforts and whoever wants to follow along does. Originally though I think it was a lot more like "project mayhem" with centralized leadership that created this beast.
rvz 5y ago
> just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place. Only if they are on the your side or agree with what you think. One day they are on your side and the next day they aren't. If they breach and leak data from a company they don't like, they don't care about the collateral damage or the innocent users getting caught in the crossfire, they just move on to the next target or the villain of the week. The nature of anarchist hacktivist groups is that they are on no-one's side.

slater 5y ago

They're legion.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
They do not forget. They do not forgive.

dncornholio 5y ago

> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective This is what it is, until proven otherwise

rosndo 5y ago

d4ngmpreg 5y ago
- rosndo 5y ago
  The truth, coming from someone who used to host these boards and ircs.
ravenstine 5y ago
Even if it was ever a particular group of people, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone claiming to be "Anonymous" in the last decade because being associated with a high profile name is bad news for a black hat hacker.
gokdisjtrdcvv5 5y ago
Your last sentence is very confusing. Mind repeating it and explain what some of those words mean (eg “moralfags”)?
- rosndo 5y ago
  Originally “Anonymous” was mostly a 4chan meme, a loose collective of internet trolls doing nasty things for laughs. Later it was co-opted by the “Moralfags” i.e. people motivated by various moral causes who attracted tons of clueless people and drove away the real hackers. This is a sort-of good source on the pre-anonops history of “Anonymous” https://archive.org/details/partyvan-wiki-20111223.7z https://archive.org/details/partyvan-wiki-20111223.7z
jaynetics 5y ago
Apparently some of these "pretending" hackers replaced the content of several Russian news websites (e.g. Kommersant) with anti war messages a few hours ago. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/handful-of-russian-media-websites-display-anti-putin-message-after-hack/47388722 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/handful-of-russian-media-websit...

pjbeam 5y ago

Anonymous is a meme that I think has been wielded by different groups at different times. There is no "official" anonymous and all it takes to join is to think to yourself "I am anonymous". If some of the reports of hacks coming out of the war zone and surrounding areas are true (such as tweet claiming Belarussian rail had been disrupted) then I suspect that Western state actors are using the meme right now.

rosndo 5y ago
The Belarusian hacks are by a group going by “cyber partisans”, completely irrelevant to this discussion.
tyleo 5y ago
While I’m no expert, this comment most accurately captures my suspicion: it is just a flag flown by various groups at various times as a sort of digital cover. In these times, it could be said that anyone clicking one of those links to DDoS a Russian state website is “Anonymous”. Still others may be governmental entities (CIA has been suggested) flying the anonymous flag to cover separate attacks. In other times, it could be a group taking down Xbox LIVE for “lolz”.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Exactly this - the Guy Fawkes mask is the modern Jolly Roger. Sometimes you cheer for the pirates, sometimes they raid a ship you think doesn't deserve it. And sometimes state sponsored groups use it for cover.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
Asking "who are anonymous" is like asking "who flies the jolly Rodger." It's useful given context but in general has no answer. In the context of the Ukraine conflict: Given that most of what I've seen anyway is 100% propaganda and no memes it's likely US government agents.

d4ngmpreg 5y ago

As with any hacktivist group that never hits TPTB where it would actually hurt, chances are they're CIA/similar.

throwawayay02 5y ago

They were coopted for political interests over a decade ago, and so any organic interest moved on. Now they are used as boogyman, as a honey pot or as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys".

rosndo 5y ago
Today it’s all about attention-seekers working to gather as many twitter followers as possible by pretending to be hackers. > as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys". If you consider Russian intelligence services to be the “good guys”, sure.
itake 5y ago
do you have links about this? Didn't they have a couple social media handles on twitter and yt?
- rosndo 5y ago
  No. This was never a thing. A variety of grifters created fake “official” accounts like @youranonnews in order to enrich themselves.

posix_me_less 5y ago

In theory, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alone%20complex https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alon... In practice, it may be some controlled operation.

willis936 5y ago

Speculation as to what the entities claiming to be Anonymous now are should be informed by the history of Anonymous. I recommend the book "It Came From Something Awful". Along the way you'll be told the history of counterculture and why you feel despair.

seneca 5y ago
I've been involved with various factions of these communities for over 20 years. I can tell you that that books gets more wrong than it gets right. It's also heavily grinding a political axe.
- bena 5y ago
  I just checked out some reviews and apparently the author didn't even bother to try and contact Lowtax. If one were to write a book about Something Awful, the only way that's not step one is because you got the idea today.
- willis936 5y ago
  There are certainly takes mixed with facts and the takes don't always agree with my observations, but I think on the whole the pictures painted are the correct shape.

xdfg13345 5y ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/834/ https://xkcd.com/834/

john-doe 5y ago

Anyone with a botnet.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

There was a hacker group several years ago that had some major hacks in their day. But then they kind of fizzled out after the arrests of their leaders, with dozens of people arrested for involvement. With many of the big names in the group arrested, the rest broke away and disappeared, doing whatever they do now. However, the name still had impact and popularity, so grifters set up Twitter news channels, claimed to members, blah blah blah. It's like "Dread Pirate Roberts" now.

busterarm 5y ago

Absolutely not Kirtaner. Even if he may possibly have access to a twitter account.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Someone that calls them self Anonymous. " I am anonymous" look I am part of it. Mainly this started on the 4Chan image board because you could do anonymous posting of content. Then it moved forward doing various other hacking / social culture jamming or mainly just trolling people.

ushakov 5y ago

Anonymous i knew of were 14 year olds with LOIC synced to IRC server

0x0000000 5y ago

> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective? Always has been. Wikipedia is pretty thorough[0]. Anonymous arose from 4chan, and while subgroups have certainly organized (of which Lulzsec is probably most notable), the "Anonymous" moniker is used by the folks who frequent(ed) 4chan, Something Awful, YTMND -- it was never a stable group, never had a leader. It's just whoever was around at the time and felt like joining in (... often, for the lulz). A majority of "participants" were script kiddies - downloading tools someone else wrote, naive DDoS attacks, and things of that nature. But there were also some who really knew their shit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)

pluc 5y ago

The CIA

blacksqr 5y ago

That's like asking what color is black.

itchyjunk 5y ago

In a completely hypothetical, imaginary, (not our) world, Anynomous was just a bunch of wanna be hackers who could only use scripts and such. They had some talent that could write scripts but mostly for denial of service etc. As luck would have it, some highly skilled band of people decided to use the Anonymous philosophical movement to push their own agenda forward. Thus lulzsec [0] was born and from within the anonymous ranks performed a series of hacks that got anonymous more attention then it knew what to do with. Lulzsec were also claiming[1] to be forwarding the philosophy of anti-sec[3]. But in this hypothetical world, anti-sec was anti attention. They believed getting media attention, white hat hacking, publishing etc all lead to reduced exploits for them to use and more unwanted attention they wanted to avoid. This might have gotten them more attention than from just law enforcement. Rumor had is that it was Teamp0isoN [3] that leaked some information about lulzsec to law enforcement. At least some supposed members of that group were claiming such (on random irc) before the bust of lulzsec was announced. But in honestly, there were dozens of different irc servers at some point that all claimed to be Anonymous. Because it was supposed to be some type of hivemind, there wasn't any one place that could claim authority. Before their lulzsec stuff, the appear in zines for various groups like h0n0, zfo, el8 where they get mentioned as `scriptkiddies` and exploits of their servers getting owned is presented as entertainment for anyone reading it [4]. Hopefully this is at least entertaining if completely fictional. Some things are very hard to know/verify as an outsider looking in. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN [4] https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hackers/ https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hack...

janmarsal 5y ago

Don't trust anyone on Twitter who claims to be Anonymous. The original Anonymous got coopted by the rival group Pseudonymous who just use their name and fame for publicity.

bg117 5y ago

If you give them a name, they cease to be Anonymous. Is it not?