Anonymous trolls NSA with ‘keywords of terror,’ disables website

Anonymous disables the National Security Agency’s website and trolls their “impressive surveillance apparatus” with “keywords of terror” as part of Operation Troll the NSA (#OpTrollTheNSA).

Hacktivists associated with the international internet collective Anonymous initiated Operation Troll the NSA on June 12. The action was in response to bombshell revelations made by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former federal government contract worker who revealed details of a vast secret surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Softpedia reports that hackers from the WikiCrew disrupted the official NSA website, nsa.gov, via a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on June 12. At the time of publication, the site had been inaccessible for over 13 hours.

Softpedia also reports “hackers of the St0rmyw0rm group leaked a file in which they claim contains the email addresses of over 400 individuals that work for the NSA.”

In addition to temporarily disabling the official NSA website and leaking NSA employees' email addresses, hacktivists associated with Anonymous, actually trolled the NSA by sending out a large number of messages, emails and tweets containing terror-related words. The following is an excerpt from the trollthensa.com website:

If millions of us, all at the same exact time, call or email someone with our keywords-of-terror-filled script, we can give our nation’s impressive surveillance apparatus the kind of test it deserves. They say they don’t read or listen to the contents of our messages. Why not test it out? It’ll be fun.

Last week, Anonymous hacktivists released a collection of documents detailing the U.S. government’s covert intelligence-sharing network. This led to exposing key elements of a secret data-mining program currently being operated by the National Security Agency and in doing so, illuminating some of the “Net Centric Operations” being conducted by the Department of Defense. In particular, the documents offer a detailed look at the DoD’s “Global Information Grid” (GIG), a top-secret intelligence-sharing network.

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