Anonymous Hackers Change OpKillingBay Tactics, Campaign Goes Global
Akamai SIRT (Security Intelligence Response Team) issued yesterday a new threat advisory warning companies that one of Anonymous’ most famous hacktivism campaigns has now changed its MO, with DDoS attacks carried out all over the globe, not just in Japan.
OpKillingBay started as early as 2013 and was a collective effort from Anonymous hackers who set out to attack and shut down websites belonging to the Japanese government because of their intense and gruesome whale and dolphin hunting operations.
The Anonymous operation continued non-stop all these years, but the hackers rarely targeted sites outside Japan’s government and local municipalities.
Two rare exceptions occurred in November 2015, when the group shut down fivegovernment websites in Iceland for participating in whale hunting operations, and then in January, when the hackers attacked Nissan just because it was a big Japanese corporation and didn’t use its influence to discourage whale hunting in the country.
The Iceland and Nissan attacks were eye-openers
Akamai researchers say that these exceptions are now the norm in DDoS attacks marked with the OpKillingBay tag. Hacktivists are now attacking not only the Japanese government for continuing to run somewhat illegal whale hunting operations, but also the governments and companies from other countries such as Iceland, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands.
Furthermore, attacks have also been recorded against companies that have nothing to do with officials whale hunting policies but are still targeted because they don’t do anything about it.
Akamai says that after the Nissan DDoS attack in January, the company has seen similar attacks against a different automaker on February 4.
Besides the automotive industry, attacks were also carried out against companies activating in the retail business, telecommunications, transportation, sports, travel, theme parks, seafood, and financial sectors.
Seeing that Japanese officials have largely ignored the past DDoS incidents, the hacktivists seem poised to make as much noise as possible for their campaign by targeting everything that has remotely anything to do with whale and dolphin hunting.
Source | SoftPedia
