The Minneapolis Police Department’s website has shown signs of a cyber-attack since late Saturday, days after a video purported to be from the hacktivist group Anonymous promised retribution for the death of George Floyd during an arrest.
Websites for the police department and the city of Minneapolis were temporarily inaccessible on Saturday as protesters in cities around the U.S. marched against police violence aimed at black Americans.
By Sunday morning, the pages sometimes required visitors to submit “captchas” to verify they weren’t bots, a tool used to mitigate hacks that attempt to overwhelm pages with automated requests until they stop responding.
The Anonymous video, posted on May 28 to a Facebook page affiliated with the group, and now viewed almost 2 million times, is a montage of news footage and a masked narrator, complete with trademark electronic voice. The narration accuses MPD of having “a horrific track record of violence and corruption,” claiming that the killing of George Floyd was “merely the tip of the iceberg.” The video goes on to claim the hackers are acting after “numerous” MPD killings in recent years.
“Sadly, in the vast majority of police killings, the only one left alive to tell the story is the officer who took the person’s life,” the Anonymous narrator says. “This travesty has gone on for far too long... and now the people have had enough.”
Anonymous has ceded the media spotlight to other activist groups in recent years—spates of arrests and the rise of other causes have seen to that. Today, the group is an even looser affiliation of hackers than it was before, organized to make it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track down networks of individuals.
With an umbrella agenda, self-styled members initiate and then co-ordinate areas of activity. As such, to characterize this as an overly organized attack would be wrong. That said if some of the group’s members were responsible for taking down MPD’s website, that suggests the harnessing of a potent botnet in short order.
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