12/10/2011

By Scott Thompson

In the latest twist to the Anonymous/New York Stock Exchange story, the hacker collective has called the threat to erase the NYSE from the internet a "high-scale media scare tactic."

Last week, in a video posted on YouTube, Anonymous said it would unleash a DDoS attack on 10 October, in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Manhattan.

That failed to happen, although NYSE.com did experience brief outages during Monday afternoon. Conflicting messages emerged from the Anonymous camp, some claiming that the plan had been aborted and some saying that it did not exist in the first place. Now a new video has been posted on YouTube, in which a computer generated voice says: "What we've created was a high-scale media scare tactic. Even though we said the operation was fake, countless times, the media still went with it being true. Once the media and the government get used to the messages we send out as fake, they will let their guard down and once this happens we will strike...mercilessly."

It adds that: "There is a plan and we will carry it out....big plans are coming. This operation was to see how the media would respond and clearly what we saw was the media being gullible. We hope they will always stay this way. It is, after all, what they are good at. They fell for our trick and we are laughing at them."