Anonymous OpUSA Cyberattack Plan Goes Out With A Fizzle

On Monday, Anonymous and various extremist Islamic hacking collectives announced their OpUSA mission, which was a planned cyberattack against nine big-name US agencies/institutions that the hackers wanted to take down. The attack was announced in a manifesto of sorts on Pastebin, which you can read here if poor grammar is of no bother to you. Not surprisingly, the attack appears to have fizzled out with little effect.

The OpUSA cyberattack was set to take place on May 7, which has come and gone for most of those in the US, and thus far no reports have surfaced regarding cyberattacks against the intended targets, among which was the Pentagon, NSA, FBI, the White House's website, Capital One, Bank of America, and many more banks. A YouTube video was also specified as a target.

YouTube hosted a video titled "Innocence of Muslims," which Islamist hacking collective Izz al-Din Qassam Cyber Fighters would remove from the website, said Anonymous. Several other Islamic hacking collectives were also specified in the cyberattack's announcement. For all the grand talk, however, little came of it and websites were by-and-large unaffected.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement earlier this week akin to an amused pat on the head, stating that the attack, at the most, would temporarily disrupt websites and nothing else. According to Mashable, the Honolulu Police Department and one hundred or so obscure small businesses had their websites hacked. That took place on May 6, however, and may have been unrelated.

[via Mashable]