No.
Anonymous is not a "collective". Instead, it's a fiction, a pretense, propped up by the press because they love a good story.
Anonymous is not a "collective". Instead, it's a fiction, a pretense, propped up by the press because they love a good story.
They aren't really "activists". It's not that they are working tirelessly for a cause, and include hacking as one of their activities to fight for that cause. Instead, they enjoy hacking and causing trouble, and choose the cause to justify the hacks.
The recent "password dump" of Minneapolis government workers was fictional. They scraped dumps from other sites with Minneapolis email addresses and published those. Thus, you had passwords including the work "linkedin", because they actually came from the LinkedIn dump.
The DDoS was fictional. I mean, it really happened, but anybody can pay $5 to a stresser to overload a website. And the website can quickly put itself in front of a DDoS protection service like CloudFlare, which is why the site was back up by 9am before anybody really noticed.
In other words, the DDoS was something that happened in the news rather than something that happened that really affected people.
There is not a "return of Anonymous" in the news. Instead, it's the news. Nobody would've noticed a DDoS against Minneapolis if it weren't for the current news cycle. The next time violent protests break out in 100 cities you'll see a return of Anonymous in the news.
Sure, there are occasionally groups of people that actually do band together and cause some lulz. But then they tire of the game and leave after a couple years and the group falls apart -- or get arrested :-).
There are some more durable people with mental health issues (like paranoia) living in their parent's basement making those ominous videos and such, finding people's phone number and sending them such recorded messages. Nobody knows who they are, but they imagine a "collective".
I mention this because whenever I write tweets like this dispelling the myth of "Anonymous" I get such phone calls with recorded messages, the militant background music, that computer generated voice, the threatening message.
