Anonymous Blitzkrieg: Hactivists declare war on Neo-Nazis

Activists of the Anonymous online hacker community have launched a web campaign against German neo-Nazi and other far-right sites. Their website nazi-leaks.net makes it obvious the hactivists favor the Wikileaks strategy.

A statement alleged to be attributed to the Anonymous group announced the start of what it calls Operation Blitzkrieg, stating the goal of identifying "sites where the nazis gather.”The campaign started with nazi-leaks.net publishing a list of names and personal data, including e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, of those who Anonymous consider linked to the National Democratic Party (NPD), an extreme-right political party in Germany, donating to it, or alleged to have had some business with various extreme-right sites. Emails of NPD members and customer lists from far-right shops have been posted online for public access as part of the operation. Some of those who wrote for the Junge Freiheit (Boys Freedom) newspaper are also on the ‘black’ list, which contains hundreds of names. The NPD is reportedly planning to start legal action against the new website. Hackers also put down several sites linked to neo-Nazi activities.Anonymous is famous for politically-motivated attacks over the Internet. Among their numerous hacker assaults are the 2010 attacks on Mastercard, Visa and Paypal after they rescinded services from Wikileaks. In late December 2011, the hactivists allegedly put down the servers of global intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, and in a separate development gained access to thousands of passwords and credit card numbers from Specialforces.com, an online military and law enforcement equipment retailer.