Corrected: Anonymous Attacks ABC News, Threatens Amazon.com
The Anonymous online movement that has risen up to defend Wikileaks is so outraged about censorship that they hacked into ABC News's web site and spiked a story about Sarah Palin. Makes sense, no? Or not.
Correction: The page we thought was an Anonymous hack replacing Jake Tapper's story, from which this screengrab is taken, was actually a page created by ABC News to show the hack that had been perpetrated on Palin's web site. Our mistake. Here is the Tapper story, safe and sound.
Yesterday ABC News' Jake "The Octagon" Tapper wrote a story about Sarah Palin's claims, made in an e-mail to Tapper, that Anonymous had targeted her PAC's web site and her personal credit card. It was a "me too" attempt by Palin to get in on the victimhood and remind everyone that the real story here is Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. While it does appear to be true that her site was taken down, probably by Anonymous, neither Tapper nor Palin offered any evidence that her credit card had been tampered with, nor an explanation of what that means exactly—did somebody attempt to use it to purchase something? Try to change the billing address or phone number? Tapper and Palin didn't say.
Anyway, we'd quote directly from the story to give you a sense of how thin the credit card claim seemed to be, but we can't because Anonymous has apparently hacked into ABC News' web site and taken the story down, replacing it with a graphic repeating "Wikileaks.org" over and over again. Which is a rather crafty way of combating internet censorship.
In other infowar news, Anonymous' next target is Amazon.com, according to the loosely organized group's internet chatter, presumably in retaliation for Amazon's decision to kick Wikileaks off of its cloud servers this week. The site is still up as of now, but if the attack is successful, it would be the first Anonymous action that will cost someone serious money—Amazon being down for even a small period of time during the Christmas shopping season could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in lost revenue.