{"id":6555,"date":"2020-08-11T14:19:11","date_gmt":"2020-08-11T14:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/the-hacker-group-anonymous-returns\/"},"modified":"2020-08-11T14:19:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-11T14:19:11","slug":"the-hacker-group-anonymous-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/the-hacker-group-anonymous-returns\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n<p>[responsivevoice_button rate=&#8221;1\u2033 pitch=&#8221;1.2\u2033 volume=&#8221;0.8\u2033 voice=&#8221;US English Female&#8221; buttontext=&#8221;Story in Audio&#8221;]<\/p>\n<h2>The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns<\/h2>\n<p><\/p>\n<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<section class=\"c-share-social js-share-social-sticky\" id=\"share-social\"\/>\n<section id=\"article-section-1\">\n<p class=\"dropcap\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">At the end of May<\/span>, as protests against the police killing of George Floyd got under way, reports started to circulate that the shadowy hacker group Anonymous was back.<\/p>\n<p>The rumors began with a video depicting a black-clad figure in the group\u2019s signature Guy Fawkes mask. \u201cGreetings, citizens of the United States,\u201d the figure said in a creepy, distorted voice. \u201cThis is a message from Anonymous to the Minneapolis Police Department.\u201d The masked announcer addressed Floyd\u2019s killing and the larger pattern of police misconduct, concluding, \u201cWe will be exposing your many crimes to the world. We are legion. Expect us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-0\">Justin Ellis: Minneapolis had this coming<\/p>\n<p>The clip generated a wave of renewed enthusiasm for Anonymous, particularly among young people. Twitter accounts associated with the group saw a surge of new followers, a couple of them by the millions.<\/p>\n<p>At the height of its popularity, in 2012, Anonymous had been a network of thousands of activists, a minority of them hackers, devoted to leftist-libertarian ideals of personal freedom and opposed to the consolidation of corporate and government power. But after a spate of arrests, it had largely faded from view.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-2\">\n<p>Now a new generation was eager to join. \u201cHow does one apply to be a part of Anonymous? I just wanna help out, I\u2019ll even make the hackers coffee or suttin\u201d an activist in the United Kingdom joked on Twitter, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets.<\/p>\n<p>Anonymous \u201cstan\u201d (super fan) accounts remixed the video on TikTok to give the shadowy figure glamorous nails and jewelry. Others used the chat service Discord to create virtual spaces where thousands of new devotees could celebrate the hackers with memes and fan fiction. One of the largest Anonymous accounts on Twitter begged people to \u201cstop sending us nudes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A series of hacks followed the release of the video. News outlets speculated that it was Anonymous who had hijacked Chicago police scanners on May 30 and 31 to play N.W.A\u2019s \u201cFuck tha Police\u201d and Tay Zonday\u2019s \u201cChocolate Rain,\u201d a 2007 song that served as an unofficial anthem for the group. Likewise, when the Minneapolis Police Department website went offline from an apparent DDoS attack\u2014a hack that overwhelms a target site with traffic\u2014social media credited Anonymous.<\/p>\n<p>Three weeks later, on Juneteenth, a person identifying as Anonymous leaked hundreds of gigabytes of internal police files from more than 200 agencies across the U.S. The hack, labeled #BlueLeaks, contained little information about police misconduct. However, it did reveal that local and federal law-enforcement groups spread poorly researched and exaggerated misinformation to Minnesota police officers during the unrest in May and June, and made efforts to monitor protesters\u2019 social-media activity.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-3\">\n<p>I had recently published a book that detailed the tangled origins of Anonymous, and until last month, I\u2019d thought the group had faded away. I was surprised by its reemergence, and wanted to understand how and why it seemed to be coming back, starting with who had made the new video. It didn\u2019t take me long to find out.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">The video was watermarked<\/span>, which is uncharacteristic for Anonymous. The mark is blurred out in copies, but appears in the original post in white font: \u201canonews.co.\u201d That URL led me to a news-aggregation site, which brought me to the site\u2019s Facebook page, where the first iteration of the video had been posted on May 28. A British company called Midialab Ltd. controlled the page. I wrote to the email listed on the page, and the company\u2019s owner replied the same day. This person requested anonymity but was willing to put me in touch with the creator of the video.<\/p>\n<p>I suspected I was chasing the tail of some Russian troll farm whose business it was to promote radical division of all stripes. The first place to report on the video, on May 29, had been RT, the state-owned Russian media outlet. And the millions of new followers flocking to Anonymous Twitter accounts? As the accounts themselves pointed out, many were bots.<\/p>\n<p>Within an hour of receiving the email, I got a call from a suburb in Harford County, Maryland, just north of where I live. The man on the line told me his name was John Vibes. \u201cHey, man,\u201d he said. \u201cSurprised I\u2019m local? I made the video.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"callout\" data-omni-click=\"r'article',r' ',d,r'related',#data-omni-index,@data-article-id\">\n<hr\/>\n<h4>\n<p>            Related Stories<\/p>\n<\/h4>\n<div>\n        <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2020\/06\/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming\/610567\/\" data-omni-index=\"0\" data-article-id=\"6798511\" data-omni-click=\"inherit\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><br \/>\n            <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"242\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.theatlantic.com\/thumbor\/qHIaeKLzTfxH_DchjoMmZgvZUpg=\/150x0:1967x1125\/250x155\/media\/img\/2020\/05\/QANON_WEB_glitch_small\/original.gif\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a>\n    <\/div>\n<hr\/>\n<\/aside>\n<aside class=\"callout-placeholder\" data-source=\"curated\"\/>\n<p>Vibes told me he had worked as a party promoter organizing raves in Baltimore and Philadelphia for the past decade, which had led him into countercultural thought and, eventually, activism. \u201cI had been writing things about police brutality and I was contacted by the guy that runs\u201d anonews.co, a tech entrepreneur in the U.K. who agreed with Anonymous\u2019s politics and wanted to support it. Vibes is a freelance writer who writes and produces videos for the Facebook page, which functions as a news hub. \u201cMostly we just cover news about what Anonymous would be interested in\u2014the banking system, corruption,\u201d he said. \u201cA couple of times a month we\u2019ll look at the big stories and we\u2019ll aggregate the general sentiment into a video.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, the Facebook page releases Anonymous videos regularly, many of them made by Vibes. But he was not the masked figure speaking to the camera in the most recent viral video. The page often recycles the same footage and simply uses new audio.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-4\">\n<p>Vibes emphasized that he wasn\u2019t a hacker, but a \u201cjournalist\u201d who was echoing the sentiment of Anonymous members on social media and chat rooms. The purpose of the Facebook page was to create an outlet for that message. \u201cTo be clear, we\u2019re not a Russian troll farm,\u201d Vibes said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-1\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2018\/02\/the-russian-conspiracy-to-commit-audience-development\/553685\/\" data-omni-click=\"r'article',r'',d,r'intext',r'7',r'615058'\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Read: Russia\u2019s troll operation was not that sophisticated<\/p>\n<p>Still, my conversation with Vibes left me feeling uncertain about whether Anonymous was really back. The new hacks in May and early June were tied to the group largely through rumors. And the video wasn\u2019t put out by Anonymous hackers, but by an activist who supported their message. In some sense, Vibes was simply another fan, remixing a remix. Was it all just smoke and mirrors?<\/p>\n<p>But when I spoke with a variety of current and former Anonymous hackers over the past month, they all insisted that Anonymous was indeed reactivating. To understand why, and what that really means, it\u2019s helpful to keep in mind the two somewhat-competing interpretations of Anonymous.<\/p>\n<p>In one sense, Anonymous is a decentralized community of tech activists who collaborate in small groups on projects they call \u201coperations.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But then there is the second definition of Anonymous. Anonymous members will tell you that Anonymous has no members, that it is not a group, but rather a banner. People rally to it. And like a pirate flag, anyone can run it up their mast and start doing deeds in Anonymous\u2019s name.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-5\">\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s the vigilante,\u201d Gregg Housh, one of the creators of a 2008 Anonymous anti-Scientology video, told me. Anonymous \u201cwas designed specifically to be that way. In its initial founding, it existed as trolls \u2026 people doing whatever they wanted, with that hint of vigilantism. It was designed to be totally open. Anyone can be Anonymous.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the new video Vibes made, Anonymous represents extrajudicial justice, the superhero entering to right what the normal course of the law cannot\u2014an idea that can seem deeply appealing now that the ordinary enforcers of justice\u2014the police\u2014appear to some to be the source of the crime.<\/p>\n<p>My sources affiliated with Anonymous all told me the same thing: People were flowing back into the chat rooms to coordinate new \u201coperations.\u201d This is how Anonymous has always worked. A viral video generates a wave of enthusiasm. Then the leaderless collective debates what to do. Sometimes it settles on performative acts of protest, such as hacking police scanners or briefly downing a website. But as occurred with BlueLeaks, oftentimes more skilled hackers steal and leak documents intended to buttress a political cause with substantive evidence.<\/p>\n<p>However, both the group of people and the movement have changed over the years. And to track Anonymous\u2019s trajectory, it\u2019s necessary to understand how the entire project began: as a joke by teenagers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">In the mid 2000s<\/span>, Aubrey Cottle was part of a crew of online pranksters who called themselves \u201ctrolls\u201d and orbited two anarchic online message boards: Something Awful and 4chan. Thousands of users were on these boards\u2014almost all young men\u2014but among them was a more die-hard band who hung out in the same chat rooms, feuded online, and met up in real life. They called themselves Anonymous. The name was derived from the way 4chan presented usernames. If none was specified, the site displayed \u201cAnonymous\u201d by default.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-6\">\n<p>In 2007, a man appeared at Cottle\u2019s door. Cottle was 20 and still living with his mother in Toronto. As Cottle tells the story (confirmed in part by a friend of his), the man was from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the nation\u2019s equivalent to the CIA. Curious, Cottle led him to his room, which was littered with hard drives, server equipment, and old copies of the \u201990s hacker magazine <em>2600<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWould you be willing to use your abilities against al-Qaeda and terrorist groups?\u201d the agent asked him. A number of thoughts flashed through Cottle\u2019s mind: <em>Is this guy for real? I would never work for the feds. Should I delete everything?<\/em> But mostly he felt like a fraud. The man thought he was something he wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou want me to raid internet forums for you?\u201d Cottle asked.<\/p>\n<p>Anonymous trolls loved to conduct \u201craids\u201d on other sites, flooding online games and chat rooms with their \u201carmy\u201d of users to disrupt the space. Like cruel older brothers, they often picked the easiest target they could find\u2014younger kids. They loved raiding a children\u2019s game called Habbo Hotel by lining up their avatars to block access to the online pool.<\/p>\n<p>When 4chan began cracking down on organizing raids, Anonymous migrated to Cottle\u2019s copycat site, 420chan, which he\u2019d created to discuss his principal interests: drugs and professional wrestling. And Cottle became the de facto leader of Anonymous, a role he relished. It was during this time, Cottle told me, that he codified a set of half-joking rules for the group that became known as the infamous \u201cRules of the Internet.\u201d They included \u201c3. We are Anonymous 4. Anonymous is legion 5. Anonymous never forgives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-7\">\n<p>Cottle and his friends also were the first to start using the Guy Fawkes mask. They chose it simply because they loved the movie <em>V for Vendetta<\/em>, a 2005 film adaptation of a dystopian-fiction comic book. V, the film\u2019s protagonist, dons the disguise to fight a future fascist police state by firebombing buildings, inverting the story of the original Guy Fawkes, who is vilified in English folklore for attempting to blow up Parliament in 1605.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-2\">Read: The misunderstood legacy of Guy Fawkes<\/p>\n<p>Cottle told CSIS he\u2019d think about its offer (which he later declined) and went back to cyberbullying. But not long after the authorities came to Cottle\u2019s door, Anonymous would make the news. A Fox affiliate in Los Angeles had run a segment on the group, framing them as \u201chackers on steroids.\u201d The report implied that Anonymous was perhaps a terrorist organization, overlaying the segment\u2019s narration with stock footage of a van exploding.<\/p>\n<p>The segment delighted Anonymous. Hacking was something its members did for their own amusement. Now in the eyes of the media\u2014and the government\u2014they were a shadowy and powerful cabal, capable of <em>anything<\/em>. It was something people wanted to believe about them, something they could use.<\/p>\n<p>Anonymous spent much of 2007 harassing Hal Turner, a neo-Nazi radio host, not because the group was at all political during this period, but because Turner proved to be an easy target. Each week, Anonymous would clog his phone lines, down his website, or order hundreds of pizzas to his house. But the fun ended abruptly when it hacked Turner so thoroughly that it discovered he was an FBI informant.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-8\">\n<p>After Turner, Anonymous needed a new target. They shifted to the Church of Scientology, a recurrent enemy of hackers and freedom-of-information activists since the early 1990s. The catalyst for the new operation was a video, the one made by Housh. It used the Fox news piece as inspiration, hinting that Anonymous was a powerful ring of international hackers. \u201cOver the years we have been watching you,\u201d it announced in a text-to-speech computer voice. \u201cWe are legion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When the video went viral, enthusiasm hit an all-time high. Anons flowed into the same chat rooms they had once used to coordinate raids, this time channeling their numbers into a series of street protests against Scientology in major cities around the world. (Anonymous accused Scientology of bilking its adherents with pseudoscience and of illegally silencing critics.) Several hundred people attended a protest I reported on in New York, almost all of them dressed in Guy Fawkes masks.<\/p>\n<p>For many, the cynicism of trolling was shattered when they realized they could effect change in the real world. To the surprise of even themselves, Anonymous had inherited a conflict that had been raging since the 1980s. On one side were hackers who wanted to employ the internet as a tool for personal empowerment; on the other stood governments and corporations, who used it as a panopticon for personal-data collection.<\/p>\n<p>Presently, the Anonymous movement split into competing factions of trolls and activists. Cottle led the trolling side, but his contingent soon lost control.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-9\">\n<p>The watershed moment came in late 2010, when an Anonymous operation to support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks snowballed into a massive attack against PayPal and Mastercard for blocking WikiLeaks donations. Once again, following media attention, thousands of Anons flooded into chat rooms they had previously used to coordinate invasions into computer games, this time in an attempt to disable corporate websites.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-3\">Read: The radical evolution of WikiLeaks<\/p>\n<p>Before long, Anonymous had uncovered plans for HBGary Federal, a security company; Palantir, the tech-surveillance giant; and the private security company Berico Technologies to embarrass WikiLeaks using Nixonian dirty tricks. The story of the HBGary leak became front-page news. And Anonymous\u2019s ranks swelled even more.<\/p>\n<p>The Anons involved in the hack formed a splinter group, LulzSec (Lols Security), and went on a high-profile hacking spree, targeting major corporations like Sony and several government agencies whenever they felt that these organizations were trampling individual freedoms\u2014or simply to show that they could. But in 2012, the FBI arrested one of LulzSec\u2019s members, Hector \u201cSabu\u201d Monsegur, a 28-year-old man living in New York City public housing. Sabu became an informant and the center of an elaborate sting operation that resulted in the arrest of many of the group\u2019s principal participants. (Monsegur has denied being responsible for those arrests, though does not deny being an FBI informant.)<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-10\">\n<p>Anonymous never fully recovered. Small groups of Anons remained, but the energy behind the banner dissipated.<\/p>\n<p>Anonymous\u2019s most high-profile hack in the following years came in support of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In response to the police-shooting death of Michael Brown, the group downed the city\u2019s web servers and publicized the home address of the police chief. When officials were not forthcoming about the details of Brown\u2019s death, Anonymous leaked audio recordings of emergency dispatchers discussing the incident. However, when Anonymous announced the name of the shooter, it named the wrong person, damaging its reputation.<\/p>\n<p>Then Anonymous weathered another blow: the alt-right.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">Fredrick Brennan was<\/span> 12 years old when he discovered 4chan in 2006. When I interviewed him for my book, <em>It Came From Something Awful<\/em>, he recalled the fun and \u201ccamaraderie\u201d of the days when Anons piled into chat rooms to attack PayPal and Mastercard. But he spent his late teens struggling financially, bouncing between low-paying jobs in the gig economy. Eventually, he decided that he was doomed to forever be on the bottom as an \u201cincel\u201d (involuntary celibate) dropout. The copy of 4chan he founded in 2013, 8chan, became a wildly popular breeding ground for \u201cfar-right extremism.\u201d However, Brennan managed to shed what he described as the \u201ctoxic\u201d ideology of the chans; his tipping point came last year, when a wave of mass shooters who self-identified as fascist incels all cited 8chan as their inspiration. Since then, he\u2019s been working to shut down 8chan, now known as 8kun.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-11\">\n<p>The seeds of the alt-right had always been a part of Anonymous\u2019s culture. Though Anonymous troll armies had started out by harassing neo-Nazis in 2007, they\u2019d also coated sites in swastikas and racist slurs for shock value. And eventually, the neo-Nazis they targeted began using 4chan in their online recruitment efforts.<\/p>\n<p>So by 2016, Anonymous hacktivists had turned back to the places where they had once organized\u2014chat rooms and forums that are adjacent to 4chan\u2014and begun to fight a rearguard action. In 2018, Anonymous declared war on \u201cQAnon,\u201d a bizarre alt-right conspiracy theory that had been started on 4chan the previous year by far-right trolls but has since spread into mainstream Republican discourse.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-4\">From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q<\/p>\n<p>Some Anonymous hackers now spend their time tracking and outing alt-right organizers, often in the same networks they occupied in the mid-2000s trolling era.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">What does <\/span>all of this mean for the future of Anonymous?<\/p>\n<p>Some members have shifted their modus operandi. Several told me they now work quietly, rarely if ever repeating the mistake that had landed many of them in jail: publicizing what they do. (This has not been the case with BlueLeaks, however. A hacker involved in the leak identified as Anonymous, and other Anonymous groups were happy to adopt the hack under their banner.)<\/p>\n<p>They are more wary than ever, often openly wondering who among them are police or informants. They no longer organize on the archaic Internet Relay Chat (IRC), believing it to be compromised, instead preferring more modern end-to-end encrypted chat clients, such as Wire, Gajim, or Signal. For social media, they almost exclusively use Twitter, feeling that other companies do not do enough to protect users\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"article-section-12\">\n<p>And age has brought temperance. \u201cWe\u2019ve grown up a lot\u2014at least I have\u2014since the beginning of all of this,\u201d an Anonymous activist who runs the Twitter account @Anon2World told me. \u201cBack in 2010\u20132012, we would have decimated anything we could to make a point; now we realize how we could inadvertently affect people in negative ways.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This time around, many members emphasized, they would like to play a supporting role to Black Lives Matter, as they had during the 2014 Ferguson protests, when despite their stumbles, their presence was appreciated by some BLM activists. And in the long term, it now appears that Anonymous might be with us perennially, blooming in revolutionary moments, when it feels as if one big push might effect change.<\/p>\n<p>But there is another possibility\u2014that once again Anonymous will be recast.<\/p>\n<p>Anonymous began with teens hanging out in chat rooms. They put on the mask of the anti-fascist superhero for fun, but over time learned to play the role first with style, then conviction.<\/p>\n<p>When teens began hanging out in Discord chat rooms last month wondering how they could join Anonymous, the answer from the largest Anonymous Twitter accounts was simple: Do it yourself.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the new Anonymous stans had come from TikTok and the K-pop (Korean pop) community. At the end of May, the K-pop stans clogged the Dallas Police Department\u2019s tip-line app with dance videos. Then, spurred on by Anonymous Twitter accounts, they reserved hundreds of thousands of tickets to Trump\u2019s ill-fated rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the president found himself addressing largely empty seats.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-recirculation-link\" data-id=\"injected-recirculation-link\" id=\"injected-recirculation-link-5\">Read: The hackers who hate Donald Trump<\/p>\n<p>The pattern felt familiar: a group of teens meeting online to consume media, then realizing that their numbers were so strong, they could pull some epic pranks, or become a political collective, or maybe both. As the former Anonymous member Jake Davis put it on Twitter, the \u201cTikTok\/Kpop \u2026 stuff feels like a more viral version of old 4chan invasions\/raids \u2026 Fully expecting Fox News to make some spooky video calling them hackers on steroids.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In <em>V for Vendetta<\/em>, after a pandemic leads to a fascist dictatorship in the year 2020, everyone puts on the Guy Fawkes mask to topple the regime.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s at least how the movie version ends.<\/p>\n<p>And if there were ever any difference between our world and the other side of the screen, it feels as if it were effaced long ago.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section id=\"about-the-authors\"><meta itemprop=\"name\" content=\"Dale Beran\"\/><meta itemprop=\"url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/author\/dale-beran\/\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"c-article-writer__content\">\n<div class=\"c-article-writer__bio\" itemprop=\"description\"> <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/author\/dale-beran\/\" class=\"author-link\" data-omni-click=\"inherit\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dale Beran is a writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of <em>It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office.<\/em> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/address>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"post-item-metadata entry-meta\">\n<p class=\"has-background has-very-light-gray-background-color\">Disclaimer: Content may be edited for style and length.\u00a0<a class=\"newsium-categories category-color-1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2020\/08\/hacker-group-anonymous-returns\/615058\/?utm_source=feed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Story Source<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0\u00a0 [responsivevoice_button rate=&#8221;1\u2033 pitch=&#8221;1.2\u2033 volume=&#8221;0.8\u2033 voice=&#8221;US English Female&#8221; buttontext=&#8221;Story in Audio&#8221;] The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns At the end of May, as protests against the police killing of George Floyd got under way, reports started to circulate that the shadowy hacker group Anonymous was back. The rumors began with a video depicting a black-clad figure &#8230; <a title=\"The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/the-hacker-group-anonymous-returns\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6556,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns - Aviance Technologies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns - Aviance Technologies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u00a0\u00a0 [responsivevoice_button rate=&#8221;1\u2033 pitch=&#8221;1.2\u2033 volume=&#8221;0.8\u2033 voice=&#8221;US English Female&#8221; buttontext=&#8221;Story in Audio&#8221;] The Hacker Group Anonymous Returns At the end of May, as protests against the police killing of George Floyd got under way, reports started to circulate that the shadowy hacker group Anonymous was back. The rumors began with a video depicting a black-clad figure ... 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