The internet was abuzz late Saturday night with speculation that Anonymous — the decentralized hacker collective — had successfully disabled the Minneapolis Police Department website, in retaliation for the murder of George Floyd.
The Minneapolis PD site, as well as the parent City of Minneapolis site, became inaccessible late Saturday, according to multiple user reports.
By early Sunday, the sites were still experiencing access problems, sporadically requiring visitors to enter “captchas” verifying they weren’t bots in a front-end hosted by internet security firm Cloudflare — a signal the sites were experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, designed to render an internet service unusable by flooding it with bogus traffic. (A separate site for the Minneapolis Police Department, insidempd.com, appears to be unaffected.)
The disruption to the Minneapolis municipal sites came after a Facebook page claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous posted a video on May 28 warning the Minneapolis PD that it “will be exposing your many crimes to the world” and that “this week’s brutal killing of George Floyd… is merely the tip of the iceberg in a long list of high-profile cases of wrongful death at the hands of officers in your state.” The video, which has been viewed over 1.8 million times, features a figure wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and an electronically altered voiceover, which are hallmarks of the group.
The Minneapolis PD website has been taken offline by Anonymous & they're threatening to take down any government website for any organization attacking protestors
— William LeGate (@williamlegate) May 31, 2020
We are interventionist.
We are hacktivist.
We are journalist.
We are activist.
We are justice.
We are legion.
Expect us.We are from the internet.
We are #Anonymous.
We are everywhere.#GeorgeFloydProtests pic.twitter.com/NU3FXG7SCp— Anonymous (@LatestAnonNews) May 31, 2020
Olalekan Ajimoti – Blogger, Content Writer, and Digital Marketer helping brands and retailers build 8-figure e-commerce since 2016.
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