The past few days a group of people known only as Anonymous to the media has been making headlines as they attempted to crash Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Amazon and other services that cutoff the ability of supporters to donate to Wikileaks. They were successful at taking Mastercard’s corporate website offline for a few hours but failed miserably when it attempted to attack other companies like Paypal and Amazon. They’ve struggled to stay organized and communications channels open as Twitter and Facebook have repeatedly closed their accounts. They even used Google Docs to power a poll which would determine their next target but that soon became inaccessible also.
It was reported yesterday that a 16 year old male from the Netherlands was arrested in connection #operationpayback and apparently was responsible for running one of the IRC servers used to coordinate the attacks. Today a supposedly “official” Press Release was posted but there was a very big mistake. It was discovered by Paul Rankin that the person who created the Press Release did not remove the meta data that shows who created the document. In this blog post you can see the Authors name very clearly. Some people wondered if someone could possibly be this stupid but the answer is definitely yes.
I did a little searching and found that he has a website conveniently using his real name AlexTapanaris.com where he posts his 3D animations. A little more searching revealed that he frequented an animation/graphics forum which displayed his full name complete with a link back to his website and his username. He even started a thread about the attacks as can be seen in the two images below. The first screenshot displays his real name and his username followed by the two posts about the recent attacks.
Although of little interest to most people, another search of his username revealed his Youtube Channel which says he is a 29 year old male from Greece. This confirms that that the vast majority of these attackers are from countries like Greece, Turkey, Spain and the Netherlands. What I find most ironic is their screams for openness and transparency all while they hide behind anonymous identities.
