Operation Egypt by ‘Anonymous’

There’s more going on in Egypt than just mass protests and stone pelting. The Egyptian Ministry of Information and President Mubarek’s National Democratic Party has lots more to worry about. After a partial lift on the ban on internet usage on Wednesday, after a five day long blackout, government websites were hacked by the international hackers group called ‘Anonymous’. This hacking spree is being dubbed as Operation Egypt. Recently in the news for hacking various company websites like mastercard.com and PayPal, who denied transfer of funds to WikiLeaks, they are back in full support to protestors in Egypt.

Gathering an army of hackers across the world, the ‘Anonymous’ group took down the government’s websites, though this time the number of participants was lower (about 500) than in December, when they supported WikiLeaks. Judging from their previous hacks of government websites in Tunisia and Yemen, they seem to have a fixation in supporting anti-government protestors in their own unique way. In Yemen, they hacked websites of the Yemeni Ministry of Information, the tax office and the President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s website.

As revealed by an anonymous member, they used a program called Low Orbit Ion cannon, which floods a particular website with fake traffic, bringing it down in the process if it doesn’t have enough capacity. In a Facebook message revealing their involvement in the act, the group says, "Anonymous can not and will not stand idly while people are being denied their basic rights and human liberties. Yet there are still a lot of governments worldwide who fail to even aspire to the standard of freedom that was set the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights…". Well, Egypt’s President is definitely listening!