Anonymous is shutting down the internet

Everyone’s favourite hacktivist group is back again and this time its target is bigger than ever. Anonymous has declared war on the internet, yes save all your files now, download all those movies you keep pretending you’re not downloading because, the internet is about to be shutdown.

In a Pastebin post, the group that has managed the breakdown of big corporates and threatened the safety of government websites has decided it needs to teach Wallstreet a lesson by taking Operation Global Blackout to new heights:

“To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down,” says the group.

The detailed post explains how the group intends to shut down the internet, which includes disabling “the 13 root DNS servers of the internet”.

This will leave internet as we know it inaccessible.

By cutting these off the internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web. Anybody entering ‘http://www.google.com’ or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough.Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.

The group is notorious for targeting big corporations and government entities. Sites targeted in the past include the United Nations, Xbox Live, U.S. Bank, Twitter, and YouTube.

The recent shutdown of MegaUpload saw Anonymous threaten big internet entities. The group claimed to have access to the servers of the United Nations, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and various banks, and threatened to take them down. “We are prepared to launch a global blackout of these websites” if MegaUpload isn’t back online in 72 hours, the video said.

I suppose if the group manages to shutdown the internet for a day, those of us that work mainly online will get a day off?