Anonymous, the notorious hacker group, successfully took down the 2014 Brazilian World Cup site on Friday.
The attack is part of a hacking campaign called Operation Hacking Cup, The New York Times reports. The campaign, which uses the hashtag #OpHackingCup, has claimed over 140 attacks since the World Cup began on June 12.
Anonymous is protesting poverty, governmental negligence and inequality exacerbated by spending billions to host the World Cup.
#OpHackingCup #OpWorldCup partial score: Anonymous 145 x 0 FIFA. The game continues. Expect us http://t.co/sPiUQxeAHO pic.twitter.com/HOYAz1jwRy
— Anonymous Brasil (@AnonBRNews) June 20, 2014
Other organizations targeted include Yingli Solar, The Brazilian Football Confederation and Fiat. Anonymous uses the hashtag #TangoDown to flaunt successful attacks.
#OpHackingCup #OpWorldCup #Tangodown FIFA World Cup official sponsor http://t.co/gVzkLaxChG http://t.co/fqfEkBJyIV pic.twitter.com/XGpvJEA3Pq
— Anonymous Brasil (@AnonBRNews) June 19, 2014
#OpHackingCup #OpWorldCup #TangoDown http://t.co/uJeTTjbCda http://t.co/v7ywysMO7R
— Anonymous Brasil (@AnonBRNews) June 19, 2014
#OpWorldCup #OpHackingCup #Tangodown FIAT Brazil http://t.co/2CzODlmOqM pic.twitter.com/mmakxm1dhP
— Anonymous Brasil (@AnonBRNews) June 18, 2014
The primary method of cyber attack used is distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS. Flooding the a site with large quantities of traffic from many different sources makes it difficult to identify legitimate traffic and causes a site to slow down or become unavailable.
Anonymous has also boasted of hacking the Brazilian federal police. They released user names, passwords and a link to the internal log-in site.