0 Chaos as Anonymous attacks toilet paper, Sweden, itself

"Why in gods green earth are we attack [sic] a toilet paper company?" asked one Anonymous member this week on an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel devoted to planning the group's operations.

 

The target in question was the website of Angel Soft toilet paper, owned by Georgia-Pacific, which is in turn owned by Koch Industries, which is controlled by the two Koch brothers, Charles and David, who have funneled their vast wealth into Tea Party and libertarian causes for years. The site stayed up.

Anonymous doesn't like the Kochs (the group is currently attempting to "Kochblock" them, without much success). Indeed, it doesn't like a lot of people. Anonymous "operations" have proliferated faster than a meme on 4chan, the imageboard from which Anonymous emerged years ago.

Consider the current (partial) list of targets:

• Wisconsin's governor (for trying to revoke some collective bargaining rights of public unions) #opwisconsin
• The Koch brothers, Koch Industries, and various holdings, especially if toilet-related (Quilted Northern was attacked over the weekend) #opkochblock
• Major copyright holders #operationpayback
• The Libyan government #oplibya
• Bank of America #operationBOA
• Egypt #opegypt
• Security firm Palantir (a continuation of the #ophbgary work)
• Westboro Baptist Church (hit hard after trolling Anonymous mercilessly)
• Glenn Beck (though the idea has yet to gain much traction)
• The government of Sweden (for prosecuting WikiLeaks' Julian Assange)

The list goes on… and on. But as the targets have spread, the effectiveness of the attacks on them appears to have diminished. Even when much of the Anonymous interest was on #opwisconsin over the weekend, the group's vaunted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks could only take down right-wing strongholds like Americans for Prosperity, Koch Industries, and Club for Growth for short periods of time. Several targets, including the government of Sweden, appeared impervious.

A strength of Anonymous is the bottom-up nature of its targeting and planning; anyone who wants to start a new op simply starts one and tries to corral enough interest to execute it. But it also makes it hard to focus.

Last year, when unified behind Operation Payback (which targeted copyright holders, then WikiLeaks adversaries), Anonymous took down just about every site it targeted, including the RIAA, MPAA, US Copyright Office, MasterCard, Visa, and Swiss bank PostFinance. Even PayPal was affected enough that it called in the FBI.

This week, Angel Soft's double-ply comfort defeated the now-extremely-distributed denial of service attacks.

Even Anons are getting fed up. "We cannot afford to tackle every opponent that dares to confront us, or to corrupt our numerous societies," says one representative press release. (Such press releases can be authored by anyone and, as such, do not represent anything like an "official" Anonymous viewpoint.)

"Everyday, there are new operations," it continues. "Some even in the same exact topic. For the revolutions happening amongst our eastern brethren, there is an operation for each country. This does NOT help gain support. This does NOT make matters simpler. This will only cause more problems than solve them. Anonymous, we should work to consolidate our tactics." 

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