War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show - NBC News.com

War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show - NBC News.com

UK spy service GCHQ attacked Anonymous hacktivists protesting unlawful banking blockade against WikiLeaks

secret British spy unit created to
mount cyber attacks on Britain’s enemies has waged war on the
hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from
the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News.

The
blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also
interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not
engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with
no connection to Anonymous.

According to the
documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),
the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among
Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack –
the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government
websites – making the British government the first Western government
known to have conducted such an attack.

The
documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA
conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat
Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack –
which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away
80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.