OpUSA

Overview

*OpUSA*is an Anonymous hacktivist campaign against various American government and banking websites carried out by hackers previously involved in Operation Israel.

Background

On April 11th, 2013, the hacking news blog CyberWarZone^[6] reported that “Mauritania Attacker,” one of the organizers behind Operation Israel, is planning a similar campaign to infiltrate American websites and servers in retaliation for the deaths of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Pakistan, citing a Pastebin^[7] file dubbed “OpUSA” which suggested that the attack will take place on May 7th, 2013.

Notable Developments

On April 14th, Tunisian Anonymous collaborators uploaded a YouTube video titled “#OPusa 7/5/2013,” featuring a speech by a United States soldier criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine (shown below, left). On April 21st, another Pastebin^[4] document was released by the Anonymous-affiliated group “N4m3le55 cr3w,”^[5] which warned United States President Barack Obama and American citizens of the impending OpUSA attacks. On April 22nd, YouTuber kiluminati544 uploaded a video titled “#OpUSA Anonymous hackers send message to Obama” (shown below, right), incorporating the N4m3le55 cr3w’s statement in text-to-speech voiceover.

On April 24th, a Pastebin^[3] page was created containing a target list of United States government and banking websites to be attacked during OpUSA. On May 2nd, the hacking blog Illsecure^[11] announced that 10,000 credit cards belonging to American sites had been leaked by the OpUSA hacker group “AnonGhost.” On the same day, the security blog Krebs Security^[12] posted about a leaked confidential alert by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which warned that the OpUSA attacks would likely “result in limited disruptions and mostly consist of nuisance-level attacks.” On May 6th, The Huffington Post^[8] published an article about the impending OpUSA attacks, noting that many previous operations had been considered failures.

D-Day

On May 7th, the website Hacker News Bulletin^[9] posted a list of websites and email accounts that had been compromised by OpUSA hacktivists. The same day, the website BankInfoSecurity^[10] published an article reporting that no federal government websites had been compromised or threatened during the course of the day, adding that the the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters’ refusal to join the operation likely defused the attack. The article also quoted University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Gary Warner, who noted several lackluster successes in the operation:

Gary Warner: “[They’ve] had a couple moderately interesting successes, such as adding a host to Microsoft’s Republic of the Congo domain name and the very short-lived defacement of a small bank in Arkansas. The group also appears to have mistakenly targeted a blood-bank site, which a non-English-speaking hacker apparently thought was Bank of America.”

Also on May 7th, The Daily Dot^[13] published an article listing several small websites compromised by OpUSA hackers, including an “out-of-commission parenting site,” and online bakery and a German real-estate site.