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Anonymous Attacks Government Websites in Egypt

by Amar Toor on February 3, 2011 at 10:30 AM

anonymous tweet
The Web may be up and running in Egypt, but Anonymous clearly hasn't forgotten the Egyptian government's unprecedented shutdown of the Internet. The group of free speech 'hacktivists' is now claiming credit for taking down the websites of the Egyptian Ministry of Information and the National Democratic Party, which is currently in power. Anonymous confirmed the attacks in a message posted to its Twitter account yesterday: "Welcome back to the Internet, #Egypt. Well, except http://www.moiegypt.gov.eg – you stay down."

The attack comes on the heels of Anonymous's recent attack on governmental websites in Tunisia, which marked something of a turning point in the group's approach. Until then, Anonymous's DDoS attacks had been largely directed toward companies or organizations that had severed ties with WikiLeaks, including MasterCard, PayPal and Visa. An anonymous member of Anonymous acknowledged that the pro-WikiLeaks attacks involved significantly more participants, but told the AP that the Egyptian government's comparatively simple websites didn't require as much manpower to take down, anyway.

Tags: anonymous, attack, egypt, EgyptProtests, hack, hacker, hacktivists, MiddleEast, politics, security, top, Web, Wikileaks

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