What is anonymous? Very few people can actually give an accurate answer to this difficult question. This is due to the fact that there is such little information about this vigilante group. This makes it very hard to make an informed decision on if they are worth the time to pay attention to. Yet another frequent question asked since their declaration of war on ISIS.

First let us clarify what Anonymous is and where they came from. The group is made up of several hacktivists entities that were born in 2003 on an anonymous image board called 4chan. 4chan existed as a digitized version of a global brain were people have the freedom to speak their minds 100% anonymously. This spawned an anarchic type of group Anonymous.  So they began to become active in a vigilante and anarchic mind set. Anonymous also has no set leadership or philosophy that we know of, giving it nicknames like “The Digital Robin Hood”, and “The Hacktivist lynch-mob”.

The group still with open arms welcomes any into its ranks, and then began to develop missions. They were small scale at first like attacks on the Church of Scientology and Westboro Baptist Church. That’s not too bad right, they don’t seem like they have earned any real reason for attention or legitimacy? Later on Anonymous also took in other entities like Anti Sec and LulzSec. Then what?

In the years that followed after this merge Anonymous became a serious digital power. Several members were responsible for the Play Station Network being held hostage in 2011 for several months. They then have reported attacks shutting down the CIA when they’ve tried to interfere with operations. Earlier in 2009 when PayPal, MasterCard, and several others stopped supporting WikiLeaks with Amazon, Anonymous hacked them and released over 100,000 credit card’s information.

In summary they definitely should earn some of your interest. The fact of the matter in the group has an unknown number of supporters, an unknown number of members, with unknown locations, backed by a legitimate digital power to hack and spread information to the public, as well as, shut down any who interfere. Are they a hero or a villain? The decision is up to you, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating or pissing of an army of nerds with computers.