Latest news with #OperationDreadNought
Forbes
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Anonymous Hacks Airline Used In Trump El Salvador Deportations
Anonymous hackers claim attack against GlobalX airlines. NurPhoto via Getty Images Although it has been some years since the infamous hacker collective Anonymous made headlines, its status as a movement rather than an organized group means there is always the potential for it to pop up occasionally. And pop up it has. Under the banner of Operation DreadNought, which I assume is a nod to the battleship rather than the acoustic guitar, Anonymous has laid claim to defacing the website of a charter airline that has been used by the Trump administration to deport people to El Salvador. Beyond the defacement, Anonymous also claims to have stolen flight records and passenger manifests that include details of deportees. Here's what we know so far. Forbes Warning — 19 Billion Compromised Passwords Have Been Published Online By Davey Winder Cybercriminal groups have started to use Trump-related baits, such as fears about tariffs imposed by the U.S. administration, in phishing attacks. But concerted hacking attacks targeting organizations associated with the Trump administration have been few and far between. Password compromise, credit card theft, and retail ransomware attacks dominate the cybercrime news agenda. But what about the political activist hacking agenda? Hackers claiming to represent the Anonymous collective have reached out to a number of journalists with details of a web defacement attack against GlobalX, a charter airline that has been linked to flights to El Salvador as part of President Trump's deportation efforts. The May 5 defacement included the famous V for Vendetta mask, this time wrapped in the colours of the American flag, alongside a statement berating Trump's 'fascist plans.' The defacement can still be seen using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Mostly containing words from a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Fernandez Rodriguez regarding the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the statement was topped with a trolling 'You lose again Donnie' and tailed with a 'Made with Love by Anonymous Operations' credit. Anoynmous GlobalX website defacement. Davey Winder However, Anonymous also claims to have stolen flight records and passenger manifests, which include details of the deportation flights and passengers. Investigative journalist, Joseph Cox at 404 Media, said that he 'cross-checked known information about ICE deportation flights that come from official and confirmable sources with information contained on the flight manifests and flight details obtained by the hacker,' and information about the deportation flight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was confirmed. I have reached out to GlobalX Airlines for a statement. The Operation DreadNought Anonymous campaign has previously claimed responsibility for attacks against Elon Musk's X social network platform. Forbes Apple Passwords Attack Warning — Do Not Install This Update By Davey Winder
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk Has an Unhinged Theory for Why X Keeps Crashing
Elon Musk's social media company couldn't stay online Monday. X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was down for the better part of the day, leaving users and critics to question how involved Musk should be in paring down the federal government when his own history of trimming X had effectively rendered the site unusable. Hours after the site first crashed, Musk took to his account to vaguely blame an outside force for the failure. 'There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,' Musk posted when the site momentarily came back online. 'We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.' But even if a large group coordinated the attack, Musk's decision to clear house at Twitter in 2022 would have been enough to hamper the site's functionality. Shortly after acquiring the site that year, Musk chose to lay off thousands of the site's employees in order to cut spending. That included staff in departments focusing on ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness, and other teams, CNN reported at the time. By January 2023, the company had shed roughly 80 percent of its employees, leaving it with fewer than 550 full-time engineers, according to internal records obtained by MSNBC. One anonymous outbound employee told the network that the massive slashes would leave the remaining staff spread incredibly thin, making it 'harder to maintain the service reliably.' By Musk's own admission, te $44 billion investment lost 90 percent of its value in the months after he acquired it in October 2022. Two groups immediately tried to take responsibility for taking down X Monday. Users on Reddit shared screenshots of a site that they claimed X's web address temporarily redirected to. That page called itself 'Operation DreadNought,' and labeled itself as a part of Anonymous, the decentralized international hacking group. 'We are here to fight against the fascism that has taken root in America,' the page read. 'The Republican party, MAGA, Trump, and Musk are imbeciles who are drunk on power and get off on trampling down others. The American people are suffering for it. The World is suffering for it.' Simultaneously, the pro-Palestine hacking group Dark Storm Team also claimed the DDoS attack in a public Telegram post. But in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk claimed—without providing proof—that the attack stemmed from a third entity. 'We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack that tried to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,' he said.
