Wikileaks and Anonymous have been close for quite some time now. Many of the recent leaks that have come out of Wikileaks were obtained by members within Anonymous. With Julian Assange under fire at the Ecuadorian embassy, Anonymous have taken it upon themselves to back him up with their usual tactics.
Computer World UK is reporting that Anonymous attacked various UK government Web sites with DDoS attacks. It’s called #OpFreeAssange and it’s a protest against the UK’s handling of the Assange situation. After being granted asylum by the government of Ecuador, the UK says that they will still arrest Assange if he steps out of the embassy.
Anonymous took down the Web sites for the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office and the Prime Minister. Like most Anonymous protests, the main goal is to draw attention to the issue. The government isn’t going to give Assange a free ride just because Anonymous hacked a couple of Web sites.
While the fight is taking place in the UK, it was started in Sweden. Anonymous is hoping to rile up the citizenry of Sweden to demand that the authorities stop their campaign against Assange. They took down the site for Primavi (it’s still down) and defaced it with a message and the YouTube video of Assange’s speech from the embassy.
As of this writing, the UK sites are all back up and functioning properly. There appears to be a countdown clock pointing to when Anonymous will resume their DDoS attacks, however, so expect the sites to go back down in about 5 hours. Like I said, it won’t do them any good as far as influencing the outcome of all of this. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes out of a meeting of South and Central American countries later this week.