Anonymous, in a retaliatory assault against the December eviction of their Occupy cohorts in downtown Boston, hacked the Boston Police Department website Friday. A recent report says that another wave of online attacks may be on the way this coming Friday.
The Boston Police Department said that their site is still down after the hacktivists first defaced the page four days ago, the Boston Herald reported Wednesday. The police department began to divert web traffic to its Facebook page, and a local group stated that many people in the community depend on the department’s web page for local news.
Anonymous, a seemingly amorphous collection of politically motivated hackers from around the globe, has gained notoriety over the past couple of years for its campaigns against groups like the Church of Scientology, Middle Eastern governments, U.S. defense contractors and government agencies, banks and electronics companies. The group also threw its weight behind the Occupy movement in the Fall of 2011.
Former Anonymous member Greg Housh, in an interview with the Boston Herald, said that anyone with knowledge of a site vulnerability can get on an Anonymous chat and rally support for an assault on an item on their target list.
“It could just be one single person out there who has never even done anything with Anonymous saying, ‘You should hit this.’ … All of the major attacks followed some form of injustice in their eye, and boom, they go after them,” said Housh.
As of 10am EST Wednesday, the Boston Police Department’s site appeared fully operational.