AnonPlus Hacked (Again) by Syrian Group

Last Updated on July 24, 2011

Update August 9: Anonplus defaced once again by Syrian Hackers!

There is no peace for AnonPlus the alternative Social Network established by the Infamous Hacking Group. Only a couple of days after the defacement made by a Turkish Hacking Group, Anonplus, the alternative Social Network established by Anonymous after their account was banned from Google+ has been defaced again by a couple of Syrian Hackers (Th3 Pr0 & SaQeR Syria) in name of the Syrian Electronic Army:

A group of enthusiastic Syrian youths who could not stay passive towards the massive distortion of facts about the recent uprising in Syria, and this distortion is carried out by many Facebook pages that deliberately work to spread hatred and sectarian intolerance between the peoples of Syria to fuel the uprising.

In this moment, Surfing to Anonplus, returns the following page:

Which contains a link to a Facebook Page backing the Syrian Regime (in opposition to the Syrian Revolution Facebook Page).

Clearly the numerous Anonymous hactivism campaings nare attracting the unwelcome attentions not only by police squads of all five continents, but also from rival hacking grouops divided by ideological barriers.

As a matter of fact, at the beginning of July, Anonymous performed some DDoS attacks against Syrian Embassies all around the world as part of their Operation Syria. A similar action, Operation Turkey was declared at the beginning of June, which probably explain the above quoted previous defacement, which occurred at the AnonPlus Social Network on July the 22nd.

The Anonymous Tide is changing the world of hacking and hactivism: at the beginning of 2011, hactivism was included among the Top Security Concerns for 2011 from the leading security vendors. Afer seven months, it looks like that (actually easy) prediction was correct. Not only many would-be hackers have been enrolled (perhaps in a reckless and superficial manner) in hactivism campaigns (and often get stuck in the mesh of justice as it never happened in the last years, see for instance the FBI raids), but, most of all, the cyberspace is really becoming the fifth domain of war, used not only for propaganda, but also to carry on bombastic attacks with social, political, and military scopes.

Moreover, it looks like this is a further consequence of what I defined Consumerization of Warfare, that is the growing use of Consumer Technologies such as Social Networks for Military and Political Operations: the “declaration of war” of the Syrian Group starts from a Facebook page built up to stop the use of Facebook from their adversaries as a mean of communication with the Syrians inside and outside Syria “to spread their destructive ideas” (quoted litterally).

In this context a sentence is particularly meaningful:

So let’s fight them using their weapon

Probably at the beginning the Syrian group wanted to use the so called “their (same) weapon” exclusively against internal enemies. Once realized the latter were not the only to use the social weapons against their cause (Hacking groups, even if not motivated by hactivism make extensive use of Social Media to spread their Word), decided to expand the scope of their campaign, including anonymous among their targets.

Now it’s up to the Anonymous to place their move on the Cyberwar chessboard.