Anonymous and the ‘threat’ against Akamai and Josh Corman

TechWeekEurope published an article yesterday about a panel discussion on Anonymous at RSA 2012. Although the discussion seems to have included some very rational comments from a number of panelists, the article unsurprisingly headlined on some of the more extreme views voiced by Josh Corman – suggesting for example that within the collective “the common attribute is angst.”

Anonymous was not amused. They give me an ‘official’ (if anything within Anonymous can be official) response, which I used in an article in Infosecurity Magazine here. One thing I left out was the last two sentences: “Anonymous is forever mutating, like a virus responding to its host’s new defences. Today’s mutation will be based on finding out about Josh Corman and the real motivation behind his article, was it just to raise PR for his firm, is it linked to a gov contract etc.”

There is a threat here that I didn’t want to include in a news story.

Anonymous subsequently published the full source of its statement here; so the threat was revealed anyway. It seems that it is being taken seriously. An online chat between Tom Brewster of TechWeekEurope and ATeamAnon went thus:

[The log has been withdrawn at the request of one of the participants. It showed a conversation between the author of the TechWeekEurope article and Anonymous. The journalist was attempting to stop any issue between Anonymous and Josh Corman from escalating. Anonymous indicated that feelings were strong and growing. Updated 08:40, 12 October 2012]

What we don’t know is whether this angst/rage will focus into a coordinated action against Akamai, or whether it will evolve into disjointed small-scale anger from individual groups. That’s why I didn’t report it. But time will tell.