Anonymous, the loose hacker coalition, has declared ‘total war’ on Donald Trump. While no one knows what kind of effect this will have on the Republican’s campaign, on April first the group sabotaged the Trump Towers’ website with a group effort of thousands of people executing DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. The only problem for Anonymous with this attack is that it is temporary.
If Anonymous hopes to disrupt Trump for more than a few hours, they will need to dip into their reserves of technology. Because of the temporality of DDoS attacks, Anonymous will have to implement a more permanent attack, such as a Worm or Botnet. A worm works by disrupting a server and cloning itself to other nearby servers. A botnet is a network of slave computers that are all controlled by a master computer. Maxwell Zinkievich, a sophomore Anonymous supporter, said, “I think that Anonymous has the moral high ground.” He believes that Trump will cause all kinds of problems if he is president.
Trump is now the target of Anonymous because of his racism and prejudice. Anonymous has taken similar stands against the KKK and ISIS. They employ their main weapon of DDoS attacks widely and make themselves a general nuisance.
Anonymous operates in a gray area. They avoid breaking the law because they never steal data and their protesting never damages property. Also they operate through VPN’s and Proxy Servers.
An Anonymous member said, “While I can’t discuss specifics I can say that we have made some progress.” While the majority of them aren’t master hackers, they still can be a nuisance. The majority of members can’t even hack. However they are prolific and effective. They spread messages through social media, and loan processing power to the mainframe.
By Sean Dashiell
The Claw 