LulzSec and Anonymous have again teamed up and this time they are urging a boycott of PayPal. OpPayPal was announced yesterday and the weapon of choice was not, oddly enough, DDOS attacks, but a comparatively gentle boycott. As per usual, the obligatory Pastebin announcement cited motivations for the operation, which include the arrest of Anonymous and LulzSec affiliates across the globe and PayPal’s continuing refusal to be associated with WikiLeaks.
Anonymous is currently claiming to have been responsible for the closure of some 35,000 PayPal accounts and a reported 1 billion dollar drop in stock value, but whether this is cause and effect or just a lucky coincidence has yet to be determined. Anonymous definitely has a vested interest in spinning their facts.
As if all that weren’t enough, it seems that law enforcement has responded to the claims that their arrests of suspected hackers is futile by arresting more suspected hackers. Police in the UK are currently claiming to have arrested Topiary, a high-level player in both Anonymous and LulzSec operations. Of course, this isn’t the first time someone has claimed to have arrested a key LulzSec player, and considering how convoluted the hacker world is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the aliases have aliases. Still, it’s worth noting that LulzSec’s twitter account has been oddly silent since the arrest, especially considering that last time, a taunting tweet stated the arrest was of little consequence.
In the meantime, the current buzz on Twitter indicates that it has censored the #OpPayPal hashtag. While it’s easy to see why Twitter may not envy being party to this trend, it is interesting to note that this is by far the most legal operation Anonymous and LulzSec have been a part of and until now, their accounts and topics have remained largely untouched.
There’s no way to call how this will all turn out, how it will affect PayPal, whether or not a LulzSec member is in custody, or what the future holds for hacker groups that may have moved beyond their DDOS roots, but it should be interesting to see where things go from here.
(via Ars Technica)
