City deputy manager Tony St. Romaine says the hacker group Anonymous recently shut down the city’s website, and all because of a raid four years ago on the home of a city resident. Police only found small amounts of marijuana but shot two dogs in the home, killing one.
The city made several changes to police procedures after that incident, but that didn’t stop hackers from hitting the city website with dozens of requests for service from multiple places — a DNS attack. The city website also received what is known as a Distributed Denial of Services (DDOS), a signal it’s been hacked.
A local TV station reported the hack attack, mentioned the Anonymous connection, and their website also got a DDOS message but was back online after about an hour. The city website was down for most of Friday, but is back online now.
Anonymous is a group of activist hackers known for wearing Guy Fawkes masks of oversized smiles and red cheeks.
While city officials say it’s the work of the group Anonymous, they can’t confirm it and Anonymous hasn’t said anything. The Anonymous twitter account did however link to the dog shooting.
On Friday, Anonymous claims it released close to 13,000 passwords, posting them to the website Ghostbin. The passwords are from several websites, including Hulu Plus, Amazon, and Walmart.
