Anonymous's "Ghost Squad" Shuts Down a KKK Website With DDoS Attack
The hacker army's #OpKKK is in full swing.
Anonymous had a pretty busy 2015, and they’re not slowing down. This year, it’s already tangled with Donald Trump and tried to steal Bitcoins from ISIS — and now it’s coming for the Ku Klux Klan.
Earlier today, a group of hackers who call themselves “Ghost Squad” shut down KKKKnights.com, a clan affiliated website. As of right now, it’s still down (you can hit that link and try for yourself, but fair warning, it’s a website dedicated to blind, illogical hatred). A member of Ghost Squad told HackRead that the the hackers got “up in their face” because KKK’s beliefs were “monolithic and evil,” which is definitely one way to put it.
We targeted the KKK due to our hackers being up in their face, we believe in free speech but their form of beliefs is monolithic and evil. We stand for constitutional rights but they want anyone who is not Caucasian removed from earth so we targeted the KKK official website to show love for our boots on the ground and to send a message that all forms of corruption will be fought. We are not fascist but we certainly do not agree with the KKK movement. They are the Fascists and they are the Racists.
Anonymous’s favorite site takedown is a simple Distributed Denial of Service attack, where hackers use a massive network of computers to overwhelm a website. If a huge amount of computers all try to visit a site at once, the site usually can’t keep up with the traffic, and it’s taken down. Here’s what KKKKnights.com looks like now.
Yeah, uh, I'm not going to bookmark this.
Ghost Squad is a smaller organization that cooperates with the larger, loosely-defined Anonymous Hacker Collective. Last year, Anonymous declared war with Operation KKK, or #OpKKK, and set about causing as much trouble as possible for the Klan. In November, it started releasing alleged KKK membership information, accusing several prominent politicians of being affiliated with the Klan.
DDoS attacks aren’t permanent, but any inconvenience for the Klan is a small victory for Anonymous. The hacker collective isn’t always altruistic though — it’s taken aim at the European Space Agency and even NASA, for various reasons. Anonymous has spent most of 2016 taking on some Robin-Hood-esque cases, but there’s no telling who it will hit next (unless they tell us).
