Hacktivists involved with the Anonymous movement said recently in a video that they’ve begun a cyber campaign against GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump for his proposed moratorium on Muslims entering the U.S., and they have taken credit for briefly disrupting a website affiliated with the real estate mogul.
“Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you want to ban all Muslims from entering the United States,” a masked person is heard saying in the video statement.”
Echoing remarks made over the weekend by President Obama, the individual in the clip said that Mr. Trump’s statements risk further fueling the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS, which has advocated for Muslims to take up arms against Americans.
“The more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims, you can be sure that ISIS will be putting that on their social media campaign. Donald Trump, think twice before you speak anything. You have been warned,” the masked person said.
Earlier in the week, Twitter accounts affiliated with Anonymous said the collective had managed to knock offline the website for Trump Tower in New York, a 68-story skyscraper owned by Mr. Trump.
It was not immediately clear if the site had been crashed by Anonymous, or if it went offline as the result of an unrelated issue, but the group has regularly waged distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against targets in the past — a rudimentary type of cyberassault in which a server is overloaded with traffic to the point that it can’t process legitimate requests from would-be website visitors.
Trump Tower’s website was offline for “several hours” on Wednesday, IB Times reported, and a Twitter account affiliated with Anonymous said on Friday that the takedown was a “statement against racism and hatred.”
In August, hacktivists involved with another group, Telecomix Canada, gained access to Trump.com and posted a statement wishing the billionaire good luck with his campaign to become “America’s first openly [expletive] Presidential Candidate.”
Authorities, meanwhile, have not taken the group’s attacks lightly. Earlier this week, prosecutors announced that a Missouri man had received a 12-month sentence for his role in a DDoS attack waged against a local law enforcement group’s website last year in an apparent act of protest. In that instance, court documents revealed that the individual, Justin Payne, participated in the campaign after being provided with a DDoS tool from persons claiming to represent Anonymous.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.