While Julian Assange, the white-haired founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, is busy getting comfortable for what looks like an extended stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, hacker activist group Anonymous has been getting busy. Uniting under the banner of “Operation Free Assange”, the group soon rallied their support against the British Government.

Support from the public for Assange has up to this point been vast and vocal. When Assange’s asylum bid was not yet finalised, supporters circled around the Ecuadorian Embassy to prevent the UK police from storming the building, and large crowds gathered to hear his speech from the embassy’s balcony. This support was even mentioned by Assange in the same speech:

If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching. So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador.

This show of support for Assange prompted hacktivist group Anonymous’ “Operation Free Assange”, which set out to take down the Ministry of Justice’s website, as well as number10.gov.uk, the official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office. The method used was that of a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. This essentially swarms the servers with unnecessary communication requests, which leaves the site unable to attend to legitimate traffic, or the server becoming overloaded and the site going down.

The websites are now back on their feet, but Anonymous took out another site – The UK Department of Work and Pensions. It’s going to be interesting to see where this all leads.

[Source: RT]