German Anonymous facepalm
Firstly a short background story: there was in Germany a vegan TV cook Attila Hildmann. In his capacity as a cook, he got his 15 minutes of fame, but he began to air political statements of not kosher quality. He was not the intellectual kind of human and went deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. The provisional end of his carrier: fleeing to Turkey from criminal prosecution on Germany after some loud but not very thoughtful public speeches on Nazism.
He was mainly forgotten from news media, despite a Telegram channel with 70–100k followers and a pair of websites. And it was good — he is not an interesting kind of celebrity.
Operation Tinfoil
Today THE news source of Germany, Spiegel, victoriously intonates:
Anonymous hacks Attila Hildmann!
My first thought: why do serious people from Anonymous waste their time with such a mess? Is Attila Hildmann the god of evil? Are his websites created by the best security specialists, so Anonymous decided to take a challenge to hack Attila Hildmann? So I read further, awaiting details of deep security research and investing in advanced hacking technics.
The action was named “Operation Tinfoil”. Website https://www.attilahildmann.de/ looks after deface like
- Embed video, in English: https://streamable.com/2pfge7,
- Video transcript, in English too: https://pastebin.com/Y81bjLpP
The hack
In fact, the ex-administrator of Attila Hildmann turned to Anonymous and forwarded access credentials to multiple Telegram channels and websites. Having that, Anonymous changed passwords, moved original website content to another hosting, and finally defaced websites.
This action was named “hack” without a whiff of sarcasm, and all good people are proud of Anonymous warriors of light, who combat and conquer evil.
Perception: of the German crowd and me
Those, who accept responsibility for this action, disgrace the brand “Anonymous”. The ex-administrator of this not-so-nice guy committed a crime.
The scary thing, how many people mean Anonymous and the ex-administrator as heroes. Some commentators at Spiegel Online mentioned the criminal nature of the ex-administrator’s action — they were downvoted fast and deep.
