Anatomie d’Anonymous

Anatomie d’Anonymous

Des informations de plus en plus nombreuses sont publiées sur le “groupe” le plus célèbre de la cyber-insurrection déclenchée par l’affaire Cablegate. Il s’agit du groupe Anonymous. Au reste, ce groupe commence à envisager une certaine publicité, par divers moyens, y compris des rencontres publiques (avec masques pour les représentants d’Anonymous), pour donner diverses indications sur lui-même. D’autre part, rien ne garantit non plus que certaines de ces manifestations publiques émanent vraiment d’Anonymous.

Le Guardian, très en pointe dans la couverture de Cablegate, donne un article instructif ce 10 décembre 2010. Son principal interlocuteur est un “porte-parole” d’Anonymous, connu sous le surnom de Coldblood. Cette source apparaît l’une des plus sérieuses à propos du groupe, – si, finalement, l’on peut vraiment parler de “groupe”...

«As the name suggests, Anonymous is not a group with high-profile members. Its composition is multinational: a 16-year-old Dutch boy was arrested this week on suspicion of bringing down the websites of MasterCard and Visa in support of WikiLeaks. The family computer he is suspected of using has been seized.

»Although its attacks seem co-ordinated, it is not clear who is leading the group and its members have only the faintest of ideas about its goals. Its most audacious effort, an attempt to bring down Amazon, was thwarted after members could not agree which site to attack next.

»Described by one insider as “complex, puerile, bizarre and chaotic”, Anonymous propelled itself into the public consciousness this week with a succession of attacks on major US institutions – but it has been striking fear into the heart of Scientologists and copyright enforcement agencies for years. Earlier this year, members forced the Ministry of Sound websites offline after the dance music group tried to prevent piracy of its catalogue. […]

»Anonymous has no command structure. Members communicate using secure chat-rooms, the location of which constantly move to evade detection. The movement works through “organised chaos” where individuals post ideas and new targets to attack, and wait to see the response. Eventually popular ideas generate action.

»The technique is simple. Members target a website with repeated requests to load its pages until the site under attack can no longer cope. A site can be hit with thousands of requests a second, and this week MasterCard was among the companies that found its website could not cope. These are known as “distributed denial of service attacks” – DDoS, an acronym that is ubiquitous in the hacker community. Those wanting to participate download a special software package – LOIC, or low orbit ion cannon – which takes only a few minutes to be ready to use. […]

»The Anonymous movement is approaching a tipping point in its campaign. So unwieldy, reactive and vitriolic is the group that members often turn their weaponry on each other. Factions “attack each other regularly,” Coldblood says. The group can swell and contract, splinter and re-form – then muster an illegal attack that severely disables expensively administered websites owned by multinational corporations. It is the newest form of anarchic rebellion.

»“It is political activism to an extent,” the 22-year-old hacker explains. “But lots of the people just do it for a laugh really – there's the whole mentality of ‘did it for the lulz’.” Lulz, for the uninitiated, is short for laugh out loud misspelt, but its meaning is closer to schadenfreude. However, Coldblood believes that the days of sheer anarchism are numbered, and that Anonymous is becoming more organised. “Now it's moved more to the political side, which wants to take things a bit more seriously. It already has effectively split inside but it hasn't on the outside. You cut one section off and it'll grow back.”»

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