Anonymous Attacks Lady Gaga Fan Site: Have Hacktivists Lost Their Mojo?

Remember when Anonymous was a big deal?

There was a time when threats from the hacktivist collective actually meant something. They went after Sarah Palin, Sony, Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, HBGary Federal. They went after governments, the Westboro Baptist Church and others.

But arrests in the last couple of years seem to have sapped the group of its mojo. Now the claims seem to be far outstripping the actual accomplishments. In September, AntiSec, a.k.a. Anonymous Jr., claimed it broke into an FBI agent’s laptop and stole information on millions of Apple iPhone and iPad users. Only one problem with that – it was false.

More evidence for the amazing disappearing mojo were revealed just this week as the group tried to make a big splash on Monday, which many of us think of as V for Vendetta Day, but is known in the UK as Guy Fawkes’ Day.

Anonymous promised much and delivered little. They apparently did break into Symantec and ImageShack but the purported offensive against PayPal turned out to be a misstatement. Instead they went after a company called ZPanel. Who?

For the most part, as The Register reported, it amounted to:

Defacements against NBC.com sites and an Argentinian bank (cajapopular.gov.ar) as well as some distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Turkish government sites. Oh, and a number of websites in Australia were also defaced, namely: Ascension Australia (a hippie festival in Melbourne), Semcorp (a Australian web development company) and the Quality Lifestyle Alliance, an NGO – not an Australian government outfit as elements of Anonymous falsely claimed.

(FYI: Quality Lifestyle Alliance provides aid to people with disabilities.)

As if that’s not pathetic enough they also hit a Lady Gaga fan site. WAY TO STICK IT TO THE MAN! REVOLUTION IN THE STREETS!!! Is Equestria Daily – the web’s premiere source for news about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – next? Derpy Hooves, save me!

Oh and they also failed to do anything to another company they promised to attack: Zynga, that source of evil, greed and oppression. Folks, have you looked at Zynga’s stock price recently? It’s doing the best it can to put itself out of business.

I know you all are an anarchistic collective so controlling the membership isn’t what you’re all about, but could you maybe come up with a working definition of what is worth attacking and what isn’t?

Otherwise you’re going to sink into real anonymity.