Anonymous Targets Ferguson, Missouri in #OpFerguson; DDoS Attack on Local PD Web Site

The Anonymous hacktivist group has targeted the Ferguson, Missouri administration and police department web site in an operation dubbed #OpFerguson, according to an announcement on Pastebin.

The #OpFerguson campaign started shortly after a police officer shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. At the same time, protests calling attention to racial discrimination grew and a curfew was enforced as the National Guard was called in to stop the movement.

Photo Credit: Operation Ferguson web site

“St. Louis County Police tells NBC News they are under `some sort of cyber-attack` and that their e-mail has been down since last evening,” said NBC News reporter Tom Winter.

The local police department and administration web sites are currently under a distributed denial-of-service attack. The hacktivists also published police dispatch audio tapes from the time of the incident.

“These files compiled in this video contains audio of St. Louis police dispatch from the date of August 9th 2014, the day Mike Brown was murdered by a Ferguson PD officer,” said the description of the audio tapes published on YouTube. “We have released these tapes to the public so as they are able to get a sense of the atmosphere the moments before and the hours after Mike Brown was shot.”

Anonymous stated that some anti-anonymous hackers started a phony web site that captured IP addresses from Anonymous supporters in #OpFerguson. The web site was a honeypot that acted as a fake DDoS portal with targets such as Ferguson, New York and Chicago Police, the FBI, the White House, the Marines, the Pentagon, the Air Force and the Army. Anonymous also extended the operation by leaking on Pastebin (the link was removed and is only accessible via Google Cache) more than 7,000 alleged law enforcement accounts from the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association.

Details such as names, usernames, plaintext passwords, Social Security Numbers, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers were published.

A petition was also started to “take Governor Jay Nixon out of office for the way he handled the situation in Ferguson, Missouri.”