Anonymous set to destroy Fox News

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Published time: October 25, 2011 18:29
Edited time: October 25, 2011 22:29

An attack on Fox News from the hacker group Anonymous has been a longtime coming. Now the collective says that an infiltration on the website for the Fair and Balanced news network will occur next month with Operation Fox Hunt slated for November 5.

An operative with the hacktivist group Anonymous narrates a video posted to the Web on October 22 that announces that an all-out attack on the Fox News website will come next month as retaliation for the network’s unjust attack on protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“Since they will not stop ridiculing the occupiers, we will simply shut them down,” says the digitzed voice in the recent YouTube clip. “Fox News, your time has come . . . Operation Fox Hunt. November 5th. May the hunt begin,” the narrator adds.

November 5 has already been designated by members of the growing Occupy Wall street movement as a practical holiday, with “Operation Cashback” expected to occur then across the world. Under that initiative, demonstrators are asked to close bank accounts across the globe and move money out of large banks and into smaller, local credit unions. Protesters aligned with the Occupy movement have already staged small cashback-style closures in branches across the United States, with an attempt at closing accounts at a Lower Manhattan Citibank earlier this month resulting in the arrest of several occupies.

When Fox News first began coverage of Occupy Wall Street — inarguably a bit too late — their coverage was light-hearted and laughable. Fox host Megyn Kelly called a young female protester’s response to being pepper-sprayed by an unprovoked NYPD officer an “overreaction,” and as recently as October 25, an article on FoxNews.com describes the movement, now in its second month, as being engaged by “a ‘red army’ of radicals seeking no less than to provoke a new, definitive economic crisis, with their goal being the full collapse of the U.S. financial system, with the ensuing chaos to be rebuilt into a utopian socialist vision.”

Fox host Geraldo Rivera attempted to report live from Zuccotti Square in Lower Manhattan weeks into the protests, only to be met with jeers of “Fox News Lies” and subsequently chased out of the square by demonstrators.

“They openly mocked protesters here as dirty hippies, uneducated fools and drug addicts and potential criminals – and they don’t know what they’re talking about, frankly,” protester Chris Cobb told RT last month.

Now, says Anonymous, it is there turn for the games. On November 5, Operation Fox Hunt will aim to “destroy the Fox News website.” In the past, hackers aligned with the Anonymous collective have successfully infiltrated the servers and websites of SONY and San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) System. Even last week, an attack on the website of the Boston Police Department has been credited to Anonymous in retaliation of the local PD’s assault on Occupy Boston protesters.