Who has anonymous attacked?

• 2008 – the Chanology project and the attack on Scientology: it was one of Anonymous's first public attacks.
• 2011 – Anonymous against Sony: it was perhaps the longest, most intense and most relentless attack perpetrated by Anonymous hackers.

Anonymous launched a cyber operation against the Iranian government for the alleged murder of Mahsa Amini. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against Iran's government and state-owned websites.

According to radio Hal Turner, in December 2006 and January 2007 individuals who identified themselves as Anonymous took Turner's website offline, costing him thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills. As a result, Turner sued 4chan, eBaum's World, 7chan, and other websites for copyright infringement. He lost his plea for an injunction; however, failed to receive letters from the court, which caused the lawsuit to lapse.

On December 7, 2007, the Canada-based Toronto Sun newspaper published a report on the arrest of the alleged Internet predator Chris Forcand. Forcand, 53, was charged with two counts of luring a child under the age of 14, attempt to invite sexual touching, attempted exposure, possessing a dangerous weapon, and carrying a concealed weapon. The report stated that Forcand was already being tracked by "cyber-vigilantes who seek to out anyone who presents with a sexual interest in children" before police investigations commenced.

The Global Television Network report identified the group responsible for Forcand's arrest as a "self-described Internet vigilante group called Anonymous" who contacted the police after some members were "propositioned" by Forcand with "disgusting photos of himself". The report also stated that this is the first time a suspected Internet predator was arrested by the police as a result of Internet vigilantism.

The group gained worldwide press for Project Chanology, the protest against the Church of Scientology.

On January 14, 2008, a video produced by the Church featuring an interview with Tom Cruise was leaked to the Internet and uploaded to YouTube. The Church of Scientology issued a copyright violation claim against YouTube requesting the removal of the video. In response to this, Anonymous formulated Project Chanology. Calling the action by the Church of Scientology a form of Internet censorship, members of Project Chanology organized a series of denial-of-service attacks against Scientology websites, prank calls, and black faxes to Scientology centers.

On January 21, 2008, individuals claiming to speak for Anonymous announced their goals and intentions via a video posted to YouTube entitled "Message to Scientology" and a press release declaring a "War on Scientology" against both the Church of Scientology and the Religious Technology Center. In the press release, the group states that the attacks against the Church of Scientology will continue in order to protect the right to freedom of speech and end what they believe to be the financial exploitation of church members. A new video "Call to Action" appeared on YouTube on January 28, 2008, calling for protests outside Church of Scientology centers on February 10, 2008. On February 2, 2008, 150 people gathered outside of a Church of Scientology center in Orlando, Florida to protest the organization's practices. Small protests were also held in Santa Barbara, California, and Manchester, England. On February 10, 2008, about 7000 people protested in more than 93 cities worldwide. Many protesters wore masks, or otherwise disguised their identities, in part to protect themselves from reprisals from the Church.

Anonymous held a second wave of protests on March 15, 2008, in cities all over the world, including Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, and Dublin. The global turnout was estimated to be "between 7000 and 8000", a number similar to that of the first wave. The third wave of protests took place on April 12, 2008. Named "Operation Reconnect", it aimed to increase awareness of the Church of Scientology's disconnection policy.

On October 17, 2008, an 18-year-old from New Jersey described himself as a member of Anonymous, and he stated that he would plead guilty to involvement in the January 2008 DDoS attacks against Church of Scientology websites.

Protests continued, taking advantage of media events such as the premiere of the Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, where the venue was chosen in part to reduce exposure to the protests.

On March 28, 2008, Wired News reported that "Internet griefers"—a slang term for people whose only interests are in harassing others—assaulted an epilepsy support forum run by the Epilepsy Foundation of America. JavaScript code and flashing computer animations were posted with the intention of triggering migraine headaches and seizures in photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics. According to Wired News, circumstantial evidence suggested that the attack was perpetrated by Anonymous users, with the initial attack posts on the epilepsy forum blaming eBaum's World. Members of the epilepsy forum claimed they had found a thread in which the attack was being planned at 4chan.org, an imageboard that has been described as a stronghold for Anonymous. The thread, like all old threads eventually do on these types of imageboards, has since cycled to deletion.

News.com.au reported that the administrators of 4chan.org had posted an open letter claiming that the attacks had been carried out by the Church of Scientology "to ruin the public opinion of Anonymous, to lessen the effect of the lawful protests against their virulent organization" under the Church's fair game policy.

In late June 2008, users who identified themselves as Anonymous claimed responsibility for a series of attacks against the SOHH (Support Online Hip Hop) website. The attack was reported to have begun in retaliation for insults made by members of SOHH's "Just Bugging Out" forum against members of Anonymous. The attack against the website took place in stages, as Anonymous users flooded the SOHH forums, which were then shut down. On June 23, 2008, the group which identified themselves as Anonymous organized DDoS attacks against the website, successfully eliminating 60% of the website's service capacity. On June 27, 2008, the hackers utilized cross-site scripting to deface the website's main page with satirical Nazi images and headlines referencing numerous racial stereotypes and slurs, and also successfully stole information from SOHH employees. Following the defacement, the website was temporarily shut down by its administration. AllHipHop, an unrelated website, also had its forum raided.

Shortly after midnight on September 16, 2008, the private Yahoo! Mail account of Sarah Palin was hacked by a 4chan user. The hacker, known as "Rubico", claimed he had read Palin's personal e-mails because he was looking for something that "would derail her campaign". After reading through Palin's emails, Rubico wrote, "There was nothing there, nothing incriminating — all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor." Rubico wrote that he used the Sarah Palin Wikipedia article to find Palin's birth date (one of the standard security questions used by Yahoo!.) in "15 seconds". The hacker posted the account's password on /b/, an image board on 4chan, and screenshots from within the account to WikiLeaks. A /b/ user then logged in and changed the password, posting a screenshot of his sending an email to a friend of Palin's informing her of the new password on the /b/ thread. However, he did not blank out the password in the screenshot. A multitude of /b/ users then attempted to log in with the new password, and the account was automatically locked out by Yahoo!. The incident was criticized by some /b/ users, one of whom complained that "seriously, /b/. We could have changed history and failed, epically."

In January 2009, members of Anonymous targeted South Pasadena, California teen McKay Hatch who runs the No Cussing Club, a website against profanity. As Hatch's home address, phone number, and other personal information were leaked on the internet, his family has received hate mail, obscene phone calls, and bogus pizza and pornography deliveries.

Following allegations of vote rigging after the results of the June 2009 Iranian presidential election were announced, declaring Iran's incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the winner, thousands of Iranians participated in demonstrations. Anonymous, together with The Pirate Bay and various Iranian hackers, launched an Iranian Green Movement Support site called Anonymous Iran. The site has drawn over 22,000 supporters worldwide and allows for information exchange between the world and Iran, despite attempts by the Iranian government to censor news about the riots on the internet. The site provides resources and support to Iranians who are protesting.

In September 2009, the group reawakened "in order to protect civil rights" after several governments began to block access to its imageboards. The blacklisting of Krautchan.net in Germany infuriated many, but the tipping point was the Australian government's plans for ISP-level censorship of the internet. The policy was spearheaded by Stephen Conroy and had been driven aggressively by the Rudd Government since its election in 2007.

Early in the evening of September 9, Anonymous took down the prime minister's website with a distributed denial-of-service attack. The site was taken offline for approximately one hour.

Occurred from 8 am, February 10, 2010, as a protest against the Australian Government over the forthcoming internet filtering legislation and the perceived censorship in pornography of small-breasted women (who are perceived to be under age) and female ejaculation. Hours earlier, Anonymous uploaded a video message to YouTube, addressed to Kevin Rudd, and Seven News, presenting a list of demands and threats of further action if they were not met. The protest consisted of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on Australian Government websites. Australian anti-censorship groups complained that the attack only hurt their cause, and Australian government members dismissed the attack and said that they would just restore the service when the attack finished. Analysis of the attacks cited their peak bandwidth at under 17Mbit, a figure considered small when compared with other DDoS attacks.

In July 2010, there was a reaction to the use of one of Anonymous' slogans by the Oregon Tea Party. The Party's Facebook page was flooded with image macro and flames. Within a few hours, the Tea Party posted a message saying "Anonymous: We appreciate your resources and admire your tactics. You have taught us more than you know. As requested, we are no longer using the 'anonymous' quote." Following this raid, the Party's Facebook page was removed, and its Ning page limited to member-only access.

In 2010, several Bollywood companies hired Aiplex Software to launch DDoS attacks on websites that did not respond to software takedown notices. File sharing activists then created Operation Payback in September 2010 in retaliation. The original plan was to attack Aiplex Software directly, but upon finding some hours before the planned DDoS that another individual had taken down the firm's website on their own, Operation Payback moved to launching attacks against the websites of copyright stringent organizations, law firms and other websites. This grew into multiple DDoS attacks against anti-piracy groups and law firms.

In December 2010, the document archive website WikiLeaks came under intense pressure to stop publishing secret United States diplomatic cables. In response, Anonymous announced its support for WikiLeaks, and Operation Payback changed its focus to support WikiLeaks and launched DDoS attacks against Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and the Swiss bank PostFinance in retaliation for perceived anti-WikiLeaks behavior. This second front in the December offensive was performed under the codename Operation Avenge Assange. Due to the attacks, both MasterCard and Visa's websites were brought down on December 8. A threat researcher at PandaLabs said Anonymous also launched an attack which brought down the Swedish prosecutor's website when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London and refused bail in relation to extradition to Sweden.

After suspected leaker Chelsea Manning was transferred to Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in July 2010, allegations of abuse arose around Manning's isolation in a maximum security area, and the suicide-watch she was put under which included constant verbal checks by guards and forced nudity. Military officials denied the treatment was abuse or abnormal. In an event that led to his resignation, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley made statements condemning the treatment. In response to Manning's imprisonment and treatment, Anonymous threatened to disrupt activities at Quantico by cyber-attacking communications, exposing private information about personnel, and other harassment methods. Dubbed "Operation Bradical", spokesperson and journalist Barrett Brown stated that this would be in direct response for the alleged mistreatment. Military spokespersons responded that the threat has been referred to law enforcement and counterterrorism officials and requested an investigation.

Operation: Leakspin had the purpose of sorting through the WikiLeaks releases to identify potentially overlooked cables. According to the project, exposure had a bigger potential impact than DDoS attacks. Operation: Leakspin included translation and explanation of cables, quality control, culture jamming and publication channels. Leakspin represented a sharp departure from the tactics of Operation Payback. Rather than attacking perceived enemies of the pro-WikiLeaks movement, the sole focus is on propagating material determined to be of public interest. This potentially could lead to media outlets and the general public focusing on the issues uncovered by the released diplomatic cables rather than the morality or sensibility of DDoS attacks as a form of protest or Julian Assange's current legal travails. It is difficult to ascertain how much support Operation Leakspin had garnered in the Anonymous community.

The websites of the government of Zimbabwe were targeted by Anonymous due to censorship of the WikiLeaks documents.

The website for the Irish political party, a centre right party in coalition government with the Labour Party, was hacked by Anonymous during the 2011 general election campaign according to TheJournal.ie. The site was replaced with a page showing the Anonymous logo along with the words "Nothing is safe, you put your faith in this political party and they take no measures to protect you. They offer you free speech yet they censor your voice. WAKE UP!".

The websites of the government of Tunisia were targeted by Anonymous due to censorship of the WikiLeaks documents and the Tunisian Revolution. Tunisians were reported to be assisting in these denial-of-service attacks launched by Anonymous. Anonymous's role in the DDoS attacks on the Tunisian government's websites led to an upsurge of internet activism among Tunisians against the government. A figure associated with Anonymous released an online message denouncing the government clampdown on recent protests and posted it on the Tunisian government website. Anonymous named their attacks as "Operation Tunisia". Anonymous successfully performed DDoS attacks on eight Tunisian government websites. The Tunisian government responded by making its websites inaccessible from outside Tunisia. Tunisian police also arrested online activists and bloggers within the country and questioned them on the attacks. Anonymous's website suffered a DDoS attack on January 5.

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Egyptian government websites, along with the website of the ruling National Democratic Party, were hacked into and taken offline by Anonymous. The sites remained offline until President Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Anonymous also released the names and passwords of the email addresses of Middle Eastern governmental officials, in support of the Arab Spring.

On the weekend of February 5–6, 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, announced that his firm had successfully infiltrated the Anonymous group, and although he would not hand over details to the police, he would reveal his findings at a later conference in San Francisco. In retaliation for Aaron Barr's claims, members of the group Anonymous hacked the website of HBGary Federal and replaced the welcome page with a message stating that Anonymous should not be messed with, and that the hacking of the website was necessary to defend itself. Using a variety of techniques, including social engineering and SQL injection, Anonymous also went on to take control of the company's e-mail, dumping 68,000 e-mails from the system, erasing files, and taking down their phone system. The leaked emails revealed the reports and company presentations of other companies in computer security such as Endgame systems who promise high quality offensive software, advertising "subscriptions of $2,500,000 per year for access to 0day exploits".

Among the documents exposed was a PowerPoint presentation entitled "The Wikileaks Threat", put together by HBGary Federal along with two other data intelligence firms for Bank of America in December. Within the report, these firms created a list of important contributors to WikiLeaks; they further developed a strategic plan of attack against the site. As TechHerald explains, "the plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics." The report specifically claims that Glenn Greenwald's support was key to WikiLeaks' ongoing survival.

Anonymous also personally attacked Aaron Barr by taking control of his Twitter account, posting Mr Barr's supposed home address and social security number.

In response to the attacks, founder of HBGary Federal, Greg Hoglund, responded to journalist Brian Krebs, "They didn't just pick on any company, we try to protect the US Government from hackers. They couldn't have chosen a worse company to pick on." After the attacks, Anonymous continued to clog up HBGary Federal fax machines, and made threatening phone calls.

On February 16, 2011, the group supposedly wrote an open letter to the Westboro Baptist Church, stating: "Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011... close your public Web sites. Should you ignore this warning... the propaganda & detestable doctrine that you promote will be eradicated; the damage incurred will be irreversible, and neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover." On February 19, 2011, the church responded, telling Anonymous to "bring it on" and calling them, among other things, "a puddle of pimple-faced nerds". Anonymous subsequently denied the authenticity of the threat, suggesting that someone from outside Anonymous had made the posting. Due to their website being openly editable by anyone, it is unknown who made the post. Anonymous responded with a press release calling the Westboro Church "professional trolls" stating that they believe that it was a member of the Westboro Church making an attempt to provoke an attack, thus acting as a honeypot which would both allow the church to retaliate against Internet service providers in court, and to gain it further publicity. They also claimed that they had more pressing matters to attend to, namely the support of the protests that led to the 2011 Libyan civil war. That said, Anonymous later suggested tactics for those who wished to attack Westboro nevertheless, avoiding DDoS in favor of sending "prostitutes, preferably male", and in general to "rape their asses in the most unpredictable ways possible".

Anonymous also indicated that an attack would be self-defeating, stating: "When Anonymous says we support free speech, we mean it. We count Beatrice Hall among our Anonymous forebears: 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'" Nonetheless, Westboro's website at godhatesfags.com suffered an attack. Another hacktivist by the name of Jester claimed to bring down the websites from the Westboro Baptist Church on his Twitter account.

On February 27, 2011, Anonymous announced a new attack on Koch Industries as a response to the Wisconsin protests. Between 1997 and 2008, David and Charles Koch collectively gave more than $17 million to groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United, lobbying against unions. The Kochs are one of (Republican) Governor Walker's largest corporate supporters. Anonymous accused the brothers of attempting "to usurp American Democracy" and called for a boycott of all Koch Industries products.

On March 14, 2011, Anonymous began releasing emails it said were obtained from Bank of America. According to the group, the files show evidence of "corruption and fraud", and relate to the issue of improper foreclosures. They say that a former employee named Brian Penny from Balboa Insurance, a firm which used to be owned by BofA, appeared to be a reputable insider in the force placed insurance market, a market which, in 2012, began getting more and more coverage from various government and media sources, including the New York Department of Finance, 50 State Attorney General Coalition, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and large class action lawsuits. Balboa Insurance is now owned by Australian Reinsurance company QBE, while Brian privately consults various agencies and institutions on the inside workings of mortgage/insurance tracking systems and force placed insurance while maintaining a blog about his experience as a whistleblower.

Anonymous announced their intent to attack Sony websites in response to Sony's lawsuit against George Hotz and, specifically due to Sony's gaining access to the IP addresses of all the people who visited George Hotz's blog as part of the libel action, terming it an 'offensive against free speech and internet freedom' Although Anonymous admitted responsibility to subsequent attacks on the Sony websites, Anonymous branch AnonOps denied that they were the cause behind a major outage of the PlayStation Network in April 2011. However, as Anonymous is a leaderless organization, the possibility remains that another branch of the group is responsible for the outage, though screenshots of AnonOps promotion of the attack still exist.

On June 12, 2011, there was a DDoS attack on the website of the Spanish Police, starting at 21:30 GMT. Anonymous claimed responsibility the following day, stating that the attack was a "direct response to the Friday arrests of three individuals alleged to be associated with acts of cyber civil disobedience attributed to Anonymous." The site was down for approximately an hour as a result of their efforts.

The group has come out in support of a civil movement against corruption in India. This cyber movement has been named as 'Operation India'.

On June 15, 2011, the group launched attacks on ninety-one websites of the Malaysian government in response to the blocking of websites like WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay within the country, which the group labels censorship of a basic human right to information.

On June 20, 2011, members of the group took down the websites of the Orlando, Florida Chamber of Commerce and inserted a message into the website of the Universal Orlando Resort requesting that users "boycott Orlando". The group did so in response to the arrests of members of Food Not Bombs for feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park against city ordinances. The group had planned and announced the attack on their IRC channel. The group has vowed to take a different Orlando-related website offline every day, and have also targeted the re-election website of Mayor of Orlando Buddy Dyer and the Orlando International Airport. A member of the group left a Guy Fawkes mask outside of the mayor's home; the police are treating the picture taken of the mask as a threat against the mayor. On July 11, the group took down the website of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orlando and the Rotary Club of Orlando.

On June 28, 2011, Anonymous announced that within the next 24 hours, it would hack into the website of the Knesset, the legislature of Israel, and knock it offline. It was stated that the planned attacks were a response to alleged hacking attacks by Israeli intelligence such as the Stuxnet virus, a computer virus which allegedly was created by Israeli and U.S. intelligence and targeted the Iranian nuclear program.

The group collaborated with LulzSec to hack the websites of a number of government and corporate sources and release information from them. As well as targeting American sites, Anonymous also targeted government sites in Tunisia, Anguilla, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Turkey, and Australia. On July 21, Anonymous released two PDFs allegedly taken from NATO.

In August 2011, someone created an account on Twitter with the name OP_Facebook and announced the "Operation Facebook". According to the links on the post, Anonymous was going to take down Facebook on November 5, 2011. The date "November 5" is believed to be a reference to V for Vendetta, where the character "V" conducts his plans every fifth of November in memory of Guy Fawkes. This operation isn't assuredly an Anonymous one. There was an earlier OpFacebook that was abandoned, and this was an attempted revival. The plan was contentious and does not appear to be supported by the majority of those who say they are part of Anonymous.

In August 2011, in response to Bay Area Rapid Transit's shutdown of cell phone service in an attempt to disconnect protesters from assembling in response to a police shooting, as well as the shooting itself, Anonymous sent out a mass email/fax bomb to BART personnel and organized multiple mass physical protests at the network's Civic Center station. Anonymous also hacked the BART website, releasing the personal information of 102 BART police officers, as well as account information for about 2,000 customers.

In an event dubbed "Shooting Sheriffs Saturday," Anonymous hacked 70 (mostly rural) law enforcement websites and released 10 GB of leaked emails, training files, informant information and other information. The name is likely a reference to the song "I Shot the Sheriff" by Bob Marley.

Several contingents of Anonymous have given support to the Occupy Wall Street movement, with members attending local protests and blogs run by members covering the movement.

In early August, Anonymous hacked the Syrian Defense Ministry website and replaced it with a vector image of the pre-Ba'athist flag, a symbol of the pro-democracy movement in the country, as well as a message supporting the 2011 Syrian uprising and calling on members of the Syrian Army to defect to protect protesters.

In October 2011, the collective campaigned against child pornography protected by anonymous hosting techniques. They temporarily DDoSed 40 child porn sites, published the usernames of over 1500 people frequenting one of those websites, and invited the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Interpol to follow up.

On October 6, 2011, Anonymous released a video stating that Los Zetas had kidnapped one of the group's members, and threatened that unless the hostage was freed, they would publish personal information about members of the cartel and their collaborators in politics, police, military, and business, which might lead to their prosecution by Mexican authorities, or targeting by rival cartels. The website of Gustavo Rosario Torres, a former Tabasco state prosecutor, was subsequently defaced with a message suggesting his involvement with the organization. According to Anonymous Iberoamerica blog, in early November Los Zetas reportedly freed the kidnapped victim without knowledge of its Anonymous affiliation. However, following widespread news coverage of the video, reporters did not find evidence of a previous Anonymous action matching the description given, and found little evidence of support among Anonymous members, particularly in Mexico.

On November 7, 2011, Anonymous released a warning threat to the Muslim Brotherhood that they would take down major websites belonging to their organization. On November 12 the Muslim Brotherhood released a statement detailing the extent of the attack and that four websites were temporarily taken down. On November 12, 2011, another video was released claiming the attack would continue until November 18.

In response to the UC Davis pepper-spray incident, Anonymous released the personal information of John Pike, the officer that pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors.

On December 24, claims were made that Anonymous stole thousands of e-mail addresses and credit card information from security firm Stratfor. Reportedly, Anonymous commented that this is because the data was unencrypted, however some members of Anonymous denied the group was involved. The hackers included Jeremy Hammond, who worked with Anonymous to release Stratfor's 5,543,061 emails to WikiLeaks. The emails revealed Stratfor's surveillance of groups such as Occupy Wall Street and protestors of the Bhopal disaster.

Operation Pharisee was an attack organized via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube against the Vatican website for World Youth Day 2011. It was unsuccessful, despite a denial-of-service attack resulting 34 times normal traffic, and well-documented due to the efforts of Imperva, the security firm employed by the Vatican.

Anonymous, along with 4chan's /b/ board, Reddit, Twitter and Funnyjunk, teamed together to make a raid on 9gag called Operation Deepthroat. The raid was separated in multiple teams: The first team, the Alpha Team, spammed "horrifying" images of child pornography, gore, furries and scat on 9gag's site, followed by fake accounts made by 4chan, Anonymous, Reddit, Twitter and Funnyjunk voting the spam up, effectively overloading the servers. The second team, the Gold Team, used the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and the High Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC and HOIC, respectively), and fired on 9gag, which DDoS'd the entire site down. The third team, the Red Team, was tasked to spread the information of the OP on 4chan, Reddit, Twitter and Funnyjunk, and also supported the other teams. The fourth and final team, the White Team, was tasked with spamming chat sites such as Omegle and Chatroulette with inappropriate messages, such as "9gag.com is the place for Child Pornography!", in order to tarnish 9gag's "wholesome" and "family-friendly" name. The reason behind this whole operation began when 9gag took several of 4chan's memes and called them theirs, followed by making a legion called the '9gag army', a ripoff of Anonymous. The operation began on December 21, 2011, at 12:00 AM, and ended at 11:59 PM. 9gag was mainly offline for the next few days, except for some servers which managed to protect themselves from the LOIC and HOIC. Prior to the operation, 4chan users used fake accounts to trick 9gaggers into DDoS'ing themselves, saying the coordinates were that of 4chan. The pre-raid attack was mostly ineffective, however, as only a few servers went down.

In January 2012, Anonymous hacked the website of the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association to protest police brutality.

In solidarity with Occupy Nigeria, Anonymous has joined forces with the People's Liberation Front and the Naija Cyber Hactivists of Nigeria. Anonymous promised "a relentless and devastating assault upon the web assets of the Nigerian government" in support of Occupy Nigeria. This was in protest to the removal of fuel subsidy that the majority of impoverished Nigerians depend upon for their very existence, causing the price of fuel and transportation to skyrocket and therefore extreme hardship for the majority of Nigerians. On January 13, the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission website was hacked, with a false report of the arrest of people involved in the oil sector replacing the normal page.

In retaliation for the shut down of the file sharing service Megaupload and the arrest of four workers, Anonymous DDoSed the websites of UMG (the company responsible for the lawsuit against Megaupload), the United States Department of Justice, the United States Copyright Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the MPAA, Warner Brothers Music, the RIAA, and the HADOPI the afternoon of January 19, 2012. The operations by Anonymous were speculated to have been driven further by anger over the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

On January 21, 2012, a series of DDoS attacks on Polish government websites took place, for which the Anonymous took responsibility and referred to as "the Polish Revolution". The group via their Twitter account stated it was a revenge for upcoming signing of ACTA agreement by the Polish government. Starting with websites of the Sejm, Polish Prime Minister, President, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, later on websites of the police, Internal Security Agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs were also blocked. The presumed attack was further strengthened by the media coverage which resulted in extremely high interest of public opinion, followed up by blackout of popular Polish websites on 24th and protests of thousands of people on January 24 and 25, in major cities of Poland, against signing ACTA. Other suspected targets were the websites of Paweł Graś - the government's spokesman (blocked after Graś denied the attacks ever took place), the website of PSL (blocked after Eugeniusz Kłopotek, a member of the party, supported ACTA on air of the major TV station). Governmental sites in France's presidential website and Austria's Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Economy and also the website of the Federal Chancellor were also cracked and paralyzed.

Anonymous in Slovenia announced opposition against the Slovenian signing of the ACTA and have posted video threats on various websites against the government officials, as well as against Nova Ljubljanska Banka (commonly known as NLB), accusing the latter of corruption. On February 4, 2012, The NLB was a victim of a cyber attack and was offline for one hour, while public demonstrations were held in the capital of Ljubljana and in Maribor. Some estimated 3000 people gathered in the capital, while around 300 protested in Maribor.

Unidentified hackers cracked email boxes of some prominent pro-Kremlin activists and officials, including Vasily Yakemenko, head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, Kristina Potupchik, press secretary for Nashi youth movement, and Oleg Khorokhordin, deputy head of the Department for Internal Affairs at the Presidential Administration. Since February 1, links to contents of the mailboxes have been appearing on @OP_Russia Twitter account. The hackers confirmed they consider themselves a part of the Anonymous movement; "We are Anonymous", they stated in an interview. The information discovered enabled many to accuse Yakemenko and his colleagues in paying some influential bloggers, as well as numerous trolls, for publishing stories and commenting in favour of Vladimir Putin on negative press articles on the Internet.

On February 3, 2012, Anonymous hacked a website belonging to the Boston Police Department to protest the eviction of Occupy Wall Street protestors. BPD later responded with a sarcastic video of their own.

In 2012, Anonymous claims to have added a firewall they called The Great Oz, allegedly designed to prevent election tampering in the United States.

On February 6, 2012, Anonymous broke into the mail server of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs, gaining access to some 78 inboxes of Bashar al-Assad's staffers in the process. One of the email files was a document preparing Assad for his December 2011 interview with ABC's Barbara Walters. One of the passwords commonly used by Assad's office accounts was "12345."

In July 2012, Anonymous gave over 2.4 million e-mails to WikiLeaks.

On Friday, February 10, 2012, Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down the Central Intelligence Agency's website for more than 5 hours. Several servers went back up while others stayed down. This followed a conversation leak, in which Anonymous took responsibility, between FBI and Scotland Yard officials discussing members of Anonymous being put on trial as well as other topics on the group, which took place a week before. On March 6, 2012, Donncha O'Cearbhaill was charged in connection with the leak. He was released 24-hours later.

Following Interpol's announcement on February 28 that they made arrests of 25 suspected members of the hacking activist group Anonymous in Europe and South America, their site went down for a moment.

On March 4, 2012, Anonymous took down the American Israel Public Affairs Committee website. An AIPAC spokesman was questioned on the matter but did not respond. A video titled "Anonymous: Message to AIPAC" was uploaded on YouTube earlier the same day.

The official website of the Vatican was brought down temporarily by a DDoS attack from Anonymous on March 7, 2012. Later that day the website recovered. Anonymous has also attempted to take the site down in 2011 but the attempt did not succeed. They claimed that their attack was not targeted against the followers of the Catholic Church but against the Church itself, which Anonymous viewed as corrupt.

On March 12 the Vatican's official website was brought down for a few hours by a second DDoS attack. Anonymous also hacked Vatican Radio and gained access to the Vatican Radio database in protest against the Vatican Radio allegedly using "repeaters with power transmission largely outside the bounds of the law."

On March 21, 2012, 1.7GB of data was stolen from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics by Anonymous. The leak reportedly contained "shiny things such as internal emails and the entire database dump."

On March 16 the official website of Monsanto's Hungarian website collapsed and wasn't restored until March 26.

In March 2012, people claiming to be a part of Anonymous leaked the source code for old versions of Norton AntiVirus and Norton Utilities.

In April 2012, Anonymous hacked 485 Chinese government websites, some more than once, to protest the treatment of their citizens. They urged people to "fight for justice, fight for freedom, fight for democracy".

On April 21, Anonymous defaced the official site of Formula One, in protest against the 2012 Bahrain Grand Prix. The race was the subject of ongoing controversy, as it was being held during ongoing anti-government protests, with the support of the government. Anonymous posted a press release criticising the decision to hold the race despite the violent crackdowns, and posted data of ticket sales for the event with sensitive information — particularly the credit card numbers of spectators — redacted. Other sites related to the sport and the Bahraini government were also the subject of distributed denial-of-service attack.

On April 21, 2012 busabos of Anonymous Philippines attacked the China University Media Union website, as a retaliation against alleged Chinese hackers who defaced the University of the Philippines website, which claimed that the Scarborough Shoal is Chinese territory. Anonymous left a message that the Scarborough Shoal is the Philippines' territory. On April 25, 2012, busabos of Anonymous #OccupyPhilippines warned that they had not yet started their attack against Chinese websites. The members that can be counted in hand called the cyber attacks were a result of the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff.

On May 17, 2012, Anonymous launched an attack against the websites of the India Supreme Court and the current-ruling Congress party in reaction to internet service providers blocking popular video sites like Vimeo as well as file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay.

On May 20, 2012, Anonymous launched Opération Québec in reaction to the adoption of Bill 78 by the government of Quebec, an act restricting the freedom of association in this Canadian province after several weeks of student protests. A video was released urging the governing Liberal Party of Quebec to let the citizens protest.

On May 21, the websites of the Liberal Party of Quebec, of the Ministry of Public Security of Quebec as well as a government site on police ethics were DDoSed.

Anonymous then threatened to disrupt the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Canada, to be held between June 7 and 10 in Montreal, the same way they did for the Bahrain Grand Prix. They claimed to have accessed personal information stored in the F1 website.

On May 30, Anonymous leaked a video called "DVD Gouverne (mental)", a 2 hours long footage from Sagard, Quebec where a party for the wife of Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation had been held in 2008. Among the guests were former US president George H. Bush, premier Jean Charest of Quebec, former Canadian prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney, former Québec premier Lucien Bouchard, former governor general of Canada Adrienne Clarkson, journalist Charlie Rose, singers Robert Charlebois and Hiromi Omura, lyricist Luc Plamondon and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

An Anonymous video was released on June 8, 2012, claiming that an attack against the government of Cyprus would take place due to reasons of government corruption, media misinformation and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement On June 26, DDoS attacks took place against 47 websites of the Republic of Cyprus, which were taken down for 15 hours. The government stated that it was a coordinated attack by Anonymous.

On June 26, 2012, the website of the Japanese Business Federation, was taken offline, with Anonymous claiming this was part of "Operation Japan". The reason for their action was the new amendments to the copyright laws in Japan. For those found to have illegally copied material such as music, DVDs or Blu-ray discs, fines could run as high as $25,000 and carry a sentence of two years in prison, according to CNET Japan.

On July 25, 2012, Anonymous launched an online protest in response to the Anaheim police shooting. It began with the release of the personal information of some of the top officers, including police chief John Welter.

In July 2012, Anonymous hacked Australian ISP AAPT and later leaked 40 GB of partially redacted customer data to protest data retention policy.

On July 6, 2012, as part of the Yo Soy 132 student protest movement, the Mexican branch of Anonymous defaced the PRI party website, the party that held the power of the country for 70 years and that the 132 movement accused of human rights violations during that period. Anonymous hacked the site leaving slogans against the electoral fraud and the imminent return of the PRI party to power.

On July 20, 2012, a second attack on a PRI related website was performed as part of the Yo Soy 132 student protest movement, by the Mexican branch of Anonymous. This time Anonymous did it on the birthday of president elect Peña Nieto, and as "a gift" they left a picture of Peña next to slogans against electoral fraud and a penis shaped birthday cake.

On August 10, 2012, Anonymous launched a DDoS attack and defacement of more than 100 Myanmar websites, all hackers from all over the world joined this operation as a protest for killing Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar. Myanmar's hackers also made a lot of counterattacks.

On August 13, 2012, Anonymous hacked two Uganda government websites to protest the country's strict anti-gay laws.

In mid-September 2012, Anonymous hackers threatened the Hong Kong government organization, known as National Education Centre. In their online video, Anonymous members claimed responsibility for leaking classified related government documents and taking down the National Education Centre website, after the Hong Kong government has repeatedly ignored months of wide-scale protests against the establishment of a new core Moral and National Education curriculum for children from 6–18 years of age. The new syllabus has come under heavy criticism and international media attention, as it does not award students based on how much factual information is learned, but instead grades and evaluates students based on their level of emotional attachment and approval of the Chinese Communist Party.

Anonymous Philippines launched a series of attacks against several websites of the Philippine government to protest against the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. The hackers urged for the revisions of the cybercrime law. On September 26, Anonymous defaced several websites, including that of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Philippine National Police. They claim that the law violates freedom of expression and described the law as "most notorious act ever witnessed in the cyber-history". On October 1, they hacked again several government websites in an operation dubbed as "Bloody Monday" and asked for "a revision of the for the betterment of the Filipino netizens." In February 2014 the Philippine Supreme Court ruled out the online libel to be unconstitutional because of its some provisions.

Anonymous re-posted the names, addresses, and emails of the prominent members of the Westboro Baptist Church on December 16, 2012, due to announced plans to picket the funerals of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, followed by saying that God would protect their site. They also caused several DDOS attacks on the site itself, hacked the social media accounts of the members involved, and started a whitehouse.org petition to get the Church legally branded as a Hate Group.

In early 2013, the group released an incriminating video, photographs and tweets from the Steubenville High School football team allegedly involved in a gang rape of an underage girl in rural Ohio. They also released a number of e-mails and photos hacked from the e-mail account of one of the football programs boosters, whom they alleged to have helped cover up the case.

On January 13, 2013, the SEDENA (the Mexican Army) website was penetrated by the Anonymous branch in Mexico, and all the information found on the vulnerable servers was disclosed (including usernames and passwords).

The content of the site was changed for a video with images of the riots that occurred during Peña Nieto's presidential inauguration (on December 1, 2013), and a voice in the background pronounces the Zapatista manifesto.

The reason behind this attack was a retaliation against what they call the return of an oppressive government imposed by electoral fraud.

In January 2013, the group attacked and defaced the United States Sentencing Commission website turning it into a game page repeatedly after which traffic to the website made it crash following the suicide of Reddit co-founder and activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz was accused of stealing materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with intent to distribute them freely.

The Federal Reserve was hacked by Anonymous in February 2013.

On April 2, 2013, a professional IT webzine BGR carried out an article stating that hacker group Anonymous has started the 'Operation Free Korea.' This calls for 'controversial leader Kim Jong-un resign', 'install free democracy' 'abandon its nuclear ambitions' 'uncensored Internet access' etc. The hackers also proclaimed that if North Korea do not accede to their demand, they will wage "Cyber War." On April 3, 2013, hacker group identifying itself as Anonymous claimed it had stolen all 15,000 user passwords as part of a cyberwar against the DPRK. A few days later, Anonymous claimed to have hacked into the Uriminzokkiri main website, and the Twitter and Flickr pages representing the website.

Instead, a picture posted Thursday on the North's Flickr site shows Kim's face with a pig-like snout and a drawing of Mickey Mouse on his chest. Underneath, the text reads: "Threatening world peace with ICBMs and Nuclear weapons/Wasting money while his people starve to death." It found common ground with its alleged arch-enemy and hacktivist The Jester in which the latter had claimed responsibility for the cyberattacks against Air Koryo and other North Korean websites.

On June 22, 2013, Anonymous claimed that it managed to steal military documents from North Korea, and that the documents would be released on June 25, the day the Korean War started. However, no such documents appear to have been released.

OpIsrael was a coordinated cyber-attack by anti-Israel individuals and Anonymous-affiliated groups that target websites perceived as Israeli The attack, mostly denial of service assaults, was coordinated to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day. OpIsrael's stated goal was to "erase Israel from the internet". The attack targeted several government online operations banking and commerce sites, but most of the cyber attacks were repelled, with no significant damage done, although an attack may have succeeded in temporarily taking down the Central Bureau of Statistics site. Media and small business sites were also targeted, and some attacks succeeded in temporarily replacing some of homepages with anti-Israel slogans. However, there were several Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and web sites from the alleged hackers making false claims to have "caused Israel to lose $5 billion" and "Tel Aviv loses all Internet connection. It was one of Anonymous's biggest failures"

Nir Goldshlager a famous "white hat" hacker and CEO of Break Security Goldshlager, told reporters that OpIsrael hackers "lacked the sophistication and knowledge...while they told many lies to enhance their reputations." Israeli hackers responded to OpIsrael by taking down the OpIsrael website and replacing it with pro-Israel statements and the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. In addition, they brought down anti-Israeli sites like Hezbollah's and Islamic Jihad's websites and targeted servers belonging to hackers and broke into the personal computers of the European leaders of the operation and told them to look for the facts and not believe everything they see on the Internet.

In December 2012, Cleveland police fired 137 rounds at a car, killing its two occupants. Anonymous responded in April 2013 by releasing the personal information of the officers involved. 12 officers were later fired or disciplined for their role in the shooting, although criminal charges are still being considered by a grand jury.

In response to the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons and the lack of action on the part of Canadian authorities, Anonymous threatened to release the personal information of the rapists. However, the group claimed to back down from the threat following pleas from Parsons' mother, Leah. The group has staged protests outside the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Halifax.

In March 2013 during the Lahad Datu standoff tension in Sabah due to the clashes between the Royal Army of the Sultanate of Sulu and Malaysian security Forces. A Cyberwar sparks between Philippines and Malaysia. According to the Philippine Cyber Army the Malaysian hackers appeared to have started the attacks and defacement on Philippine websites, posting online threats and videos meaning to send a message to the Filipinos to keep away from the region of Sabah. In response to their attacks the Philippine Cyber Army defaced 175 Malaysian sites (including state-owned pages). The Mcafee Lab Researchers in their 2013 Threats Report placed the Philippine Cyber Army in the list of Global Threats on hacktivism. The Philippine Cyber Army are close to Anonymous.

On May 9, 2013, a number of Philippine Coast Guard soldiers fired at an unarmed Taiwanese fishing boat, Guang Da Xing No. 28, and killed a Taiwanese fisherman in international waters. On May 10, Hackers recognizing themselves as "AnonTAIWAN" hacked into Philippine Official websites asking for the Philippines' government to apologize to Taiwan's government. They interfered with government official websites of the Philippines, causing inconveniences for the Philippine General Election. Its resulted in great difficulty and delay in making general access through the Philippine government websites at the time of elections.

In May 2013, Anonymous published the personal information of various English Defence League members online in what Anonymous said was the first part of an attempt to destroy the far right protest movement.

On June 7, 2013, Anonymous released what was claimed to be secret documents related to the NSA. In reality, the documents were already publicly available.

On June 30, 2013, a Hawthorne, California police officer, Jeffrey Salmon of Torrance, was filmed shooting a dog and arresting his owner. Anonymous responded by issuing a video threat to the police department. The city website also suffered a DDoS attack, although it is unclear if Anonymous was involved.

On July 4, 2013, Anonymous hacked the national website of Nigeria after the country passed laws that would make homosexuality punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Anonymous NZ, a New Zealand-based offshoot of Anonymous, carried out its first operation by staging a DDoS on the web site of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), following the passage of law changes that allowed the electronic intelligence agency to surveil New Zealand citizens. In addition, the web sites of politicians who supported the law changes were also shut down by Anonymous NZ.

From August 20, 2013, to November 5, 2013, the group launched attacks on various websites including Ang Mo Kio Town Council, National Museum of Singapore which they leaked 3,600 emails, IP addresses and names from, PAP Community Foundation, and The Straits Times.

Anonymous New Zealand claimed attacks on National Party-linked websites in protest against the GCSB Bill have had no thanks from spied-on internet mogul Kim Dotcom.

Anonymous Philippines has hacked 115 government websites, prompting Philippine law enforcement agencies to go after them, citing the unnecessary use of hacking. The NBI has been ordered to probe into the hacking of government websites. While a few Senators have downplayed the attacks, they were willing to listen to their grievances, Senator Trillanes IV expressed alarm with the group's capabilities, suggesting the possibility of the group to hack government websites since "it could compromise State operations and data storage."

Anonymous posted a video warning to the Ferguson, Missouri, police, admonishing them for fatally shooting Mike Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, and swearing revenge if any protesters demonstrating against the police are harmed. The group, which has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask as its symbol and frequently becomes involved in contentious legal matters, said in the video late Sunday Brown's death Saturday is just the latest example of police misconduct having deadly big consequences.

On August 12, a series of doxes were released against Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County Police Chief. There were two reasons for this target. 1) Because he refused to release the name of the officer who shot Mike Brown and 2) Because he challenged Anonymous, calling their threats hollow. A Twitter account affiliated with Anonymous struck back with information regarding Belmar's location, phone number, family members, and their accounts on social media. That same account also released information claiming to be the dox of the officer who shot Brown, but wound up being incorrect.

Anonymous posted a video warning on News2Share to the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on October 1 announcing the engagement of Operation Hong Kong, condemning the government's police's use of force in the ongoing protests. The group stated that it supports the protesters' fight for democracy and promised the government that if the protesters are further harmed or harassed they would attack all web based assets of the Hong Kong Government including but not limited to the taking down of government websites, seizing of government databases, and releasing the personal information on government officials. Anonymous stated that it is time for democracy for the people of Hong Kong and condemns the police for harming the citizens and calls for them to instead protect the citizens.

On October 2, there have been reports that Anonymous have already taken over a few company websites in Hong Kong in accordance to a Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily.

The Hong Kong Government responded that its servers and web assets are functioning normally, and have arranged to strengthen its cyber defences. The Government further stated that it is prepared against any attempts by Anonymous hackers on its servers and web assets.

November 8, Anonymous Leyte began hacking Philippine government websites to protest the alleged incompetence government officials exhibited in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan).

More than 10 government websites were defaced by the said group and 33 more were brought rendered inaccessible, for up to 7 hours and a week before, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) was reportedly hacked with some 2,000 email addresses, usernames, and password hashes released on Pastebin.

The "Operation Infosurge" was done during the Haiyan Anniversary, which was expected to be a day of prayer and thanksgiving, but turned out to be a day of protest from different "online" groups and organizations in Philippines.

In response to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the Anonymous released a statement offering condolences to the families affected by it and denounced the attacks as an "inhuman assault" on freedom of expression. They also addressed the terrorists: " message for al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorists – we are declaring war against you, the terrorists." As such, Anonymous plans to target Jihadist websites and social media accounts linked to supporting Islamic terrorism with the aim of disrupting them and shutting them down.

On February 11, Anonymous hacked at least 1 gas station automated tank gauge, changing the online name from "DIESEL" to "WE_ARE_LEGION". Theregister.co.uk stated that a hacker with this kind of access could shut down the entire station by "spoofing the reported fuel level, generating false alarms, and locking the monitoring service out of the system".

During the week of February 14, Anonymous launched Operation Death Eaters for collating evidence against international pedophile rings and their severe abuse of children to bring them to justice.

On April 2, 2015. The Pro-Philippine Hackers of Anonymous Philippines attacked and defaced a total of 132 Chinese government, educational and commercial websites in response to China's reclamation work in territorial disputes in the South China Sea, parts of which Manila calls the West Philippine Sea.

On July 17, 2015, an Anon in a Guy Fawkes mask was shot and killed by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer. As a result, Anonymous websites and YouTube channels vowed revenge, initiating Operation Anon Down. The RCMP website was reported down nationwide on July 19.

On July 21, 2015, Anonymous posted a video claiming that due to "Racism, Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Holocaust Denial" they were going to attack the website Stormfront. This website is a white-supremacist website run by former KKK Leader Don Black. The attack was planned for August 1, 2015.

Operation KKK says it has identifying data on as many as 1,000 KKK members and supporters. On Oct. 22, 2015, an Anonymous-associated Twitter account announced that the hacking collective had accessed a Klan-associated Twitter account and promised that they would expose about 1,000 Klan members by name. A later news release promised that the operation would release "names and Web sites, new and old" of "more than 1000″ members of the hate group. According to the Daily Dot, Anonymous later released "a few hundred names, Facebook pages, and Google+ accounts."

Anonymous Philippines hacked the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) website to force them to add security to vote count machines (VCMs). The hacking was followed by a voters' personal information leak, led by LulzSec Pilipinas, who placed them in the website "wehaveyourdata.com". Paul Biteng, a 20-year old information technology (IT) graduate and one of the hackers of the COMELEC, website was soon arrested by National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agents.

After the failure of its single gateway system, the Thai government proposed amendments to the existing Computer Crime Act in May 2016, which they approved on December 16. Anonymous declared cyberwar on Thailand after the passing of these amendments. The amendments allowed the government to censor websites and intercept private communications without a court order or warrant. Anonymous started a Facebook group called "citizens against single gateway" to protest against these acts. Other anonymous members DDoSed several Thailand government websites. One of these F5-powered DDoS attacks hit Thailand's defense website on December 19. It was later revealed that hackers also breached the Thai Police Office website on December 17. The website of the Tourism and Sports was also targeted and attacked on December 23. Several Thai citizens who were part of anonymous ranging from ages 17–20 were arrested.

Visitors to more than 10,000 Tor-based websites were met with an alarming announcement on February 3, 11:50 AM EST: "Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked." A group affiliating itself with Anonymous had compromised servers at Freedom Hosting II, a popular service for hosting websites accessible only through Tor.

Anonymous claimed over 50% of the data stored on the Freedom Hosting II servers contained child pornography. International Business Times reported that the hackers stole 75 GB worth of files and 2.6 GB of databases.

According to Sarah Jamie Lewis, an independent anonymity and privacy researcher who spotted the mass hack as part of her regular scans of the Onion space (Dark Web sites running on the Tor network), Freedom Hosting II was hosting an estimated 20% of all websites on the Dark Web.

Anonymous had reportedly attacked at least 70 Gabon's official sites, putting them offline. They said that their actions 'targeted dictatorships', however there was no independent confirmation of the Anonymous claim.

Anonymous accessed six email accounts of the Chilean Army and revealed 2.34 gigabytes of data related to intelligence, operations, finances and international relations generated and received by those emails from 2015 to 2019. The leaked data encompassed a total of 44 emails, 1,340 documents, 401 images, 53 text files, 10 webpages, nine folders and three videos. Anonymous also published a series of press articles, internal newsletters, travel information, judicial notices and resolutions, purchase quotes, seminars and other files of the institution. As a result, in an official statement, the Chilean Army had activated its cybersecurity protocols to prevent similar acts from happening in the future, while pointing out that the affected accounts were provided by an external company which were being used to interact, share and/or send and receive data with suppliers or institutions with a regular relationship with the Chilean Army.

During the 2019 Hong Kong protests and the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Anonymous announced its hack on four Chinese MongoDB databases, in which they had donated to a data breach notification service vigilante.pw. In a media statement they warned that "all is possible, nothing is secure", and "if Hong Kong is suppressed then China would eye Taiwan as the next target, which can precede a World War 3", while referencing the Terminator movie quote "There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves".

On May 28, 2020, the Twitter account of PLDT's customer service was hacked by a Filipino anonymous group as a protest to the terrible internet connection serviced by PLDT. The hackers also changed the profile's name to "PLDT Doesn't Care".

The first tweet by the hackers states: "As the pandemic arises, Filipinos need fast internet to communicate with their loved ones. Do your job. The corrupt fear us, the honest support us, the heroic join us. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget . Expect us."

Anonymous declared a large hacking sequence on May 28, three days after the murder of George Floyd. An individual claiming to be Anonymous stated that "We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." in a now-deleted video. Anonymous addressed police brutality and vowed that they "will be exposing your many crimes to the world". It is suspected that Anonymous are the cause for the downtime and public suspension of the Minneapolis Police Department website and its parent site, the website of the City of Minneapolis. The webpage belonging to a minor United Nations agency was also turned into a memorial for George Floyd.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for stealing and leaking a trove of documents collectively nicknamed 'BlueLeaks'. The 269-gigabyte collection was published by a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets.

In June 4, a group of hackers has released personal information on Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his family and cabinet. Justice minister André Mendonça asked the Federal Police to begin an investigation. Then a parliamentary inquiry by the Brazilian Congress investigating the issue of fake news on the internet issued a report showing that the federal government used R$2 million in public money to fund advertising on several websites, some of them responsible for supporting the president. Furthermore, Anonymous took down Atlanta Police Department's website via DDoS, and defaced websites such as a Filipino governmental webpage and that of Brookhaven National Labs. They expressed support for Julian Assange and press freedom, while briefly "taking a swing" against Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia for having 'engaged in shady practices behind our prying eyes'. In the case of Reddit, they posted a link to a court document describing the possible involvement of a moderator of a large traffic subreddit (r/news) in an online harassment-related case.

On November 20, 2020, the Uganda Police website was hacked as it was down for a number of days. Anonymous came out and claimed the hack in a tweet in response to the violent crackdown on protesters following the arrest of presidential candidate, popstar Bobi Wine. "Uganda: Police (@PoliceUg) have murdered at least 28 people, arrested 577, and injured dozens more with live ammunition, beatings, tear gas, and water cannons.  At a protest challenging President Yoweri Museveni's 34-year reign. UgandaIsBleeding ugandanlivesmatter." read the retweet by Anonymous International account. The first tweet about the hack was done by a claimed member of Anonymous stating that Uganda police force website has been taken offline in response to the violent crackdown on protesters. They should have expected us.. "

Anonymous announced cyber-attacks on at least five Malaysian websites including that of Johor and Sabah state governments as well as the International Trade and Industry Ministry. As a result, 11 individuals were nabbed as suspects.

The Texas Heartbeat Act, a law which bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, came into effect in Texas on September 1, 2021. The law relies on private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone who performs or induces an abortion, or aids and abets one, once "cardiac activity" in an embryo can be detected via transvaginal ultrasound, which is usually possible beginning at around six weeks of pregnancy. Shortly after the law came into effect, anti-abortion organizations set up websites to collect "whistleblower" reports of suspected violators of the bill.

On September 3, Anonymous announced "Operation Jane", a campaign focused on stymying those who attempted to enforce the law by "exhaust the investigational resources of bounty hunters, their snitch sites, and online gathering spaces until no one is able to maintain data integrity". On September 11, the group hacked the website of the Republican Party of Texas, replacing it with text about Anonymous, an invitation to join Operation Jane, and a Planned Parenthood donation link.

On September 13, Anonymous released a large quantity of private data belonging to Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Epik had briefly provided services to an abortion "whistleblower" website run by the anti-abortion Texas Right to Life organization, but the reporting form went offline on September 4 after Epik told the group they had violated their terms of service by collecting private information about third parties. The data included domain purchase and transfer details, account credentials and logins, payment history, employee emails, and unidentified private keys. The hackers claimed they had obtained "a decade's worth of data" which included all customers and all domains ever hosted or registered through the company, and which included poorly encrypted passwords and other sensitive data stored in plaintext. Later on September 13, the Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) organization said they were working to curate the allegedly leaked data for public download, and said that it consisted of "180 gigabytes of user, registration, forwarding and other information". Publications including The Daily Dot and The Record by Recorded Future subsequently confirmed the veracity of the hack and the types of data that had been exposed.

Concurrently, the group announced that they have hacked the accounts of German conspiracy theorist Attila Hildmann; as a result one of its Twitter accounts @AnonNewsDE has been suspended and in turn caused reactions from politicians such as the MEP of the German Pirate Party, Patrick Breyer who had recommended the microblogging service Mastodon as an alternative. The hacker collective wrote that the blocking does not restrict the group in its work. The suspension caused the hashtag #FreeAnonNewsDe to be trending on Twitter in Germany.

The Brazilian branch of the hacking group hacked the website of the Brumadinho City Hall and left a video to commemorate the dam disaster that occurred on 25 January 2019 which caused the deaths of 270 people.

Anonymous declared that they had launched 'cyber operations' against the Russian Federation, in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Websites targeted include the state-controlled RT.

Anonymous is also believed to be responsible for hacking several Russian state TV channels; many users on Twitter and TikTok uploaded videos showing channels playing Ukrainian music and displaying pro-Ukraine images, flags, and symbols. Furthermore, they had hacked Russian television services in order to broadcast footage of the war in Ukraine, and systems believed to be related to Russian space agency Roscosmos where they defaced its website and leaked mission files.

A yacht allegedly belonging to Vladimir Putin was reportedly hacked by the group where they changed its call sign to “FCKPTN” and setting its target destination to “hell”. Furthermore, they broadcast a troll face picture through a hacked Russian military radio.

At least 2,500 Russian and Belarusian targets were reportedly hacked by Anonymous. These included more than three hundred websites of Russian government agencies, state media outlets, banks, as well as websites of leading Belarusian banks such as Belarusbank, Priorbank and Belinvestbank. Furthermore, they also hacked a website belonging to Chechnya's regional government. They also warned that “If things continue as they have been in the past few days, the cyber war will be expanded and our measures will be massively increased. This is the final warning to the entire Russian government. Don’t mess with Anonymous.”

In response to the seizure of Ukraine's Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant by Russia, Anonymous defaced the website of Rosatom and gained access to gigabytes of data which they intended to leak publicly. Furthermore, they had hacked into printers in Russia to spread anti-propaganda messages.

Anonymous leaked 446 GB of data from the Russian Ministry of Culture and had hacked Russian companies Aerogas, Forest, and Petrovsky Fort. From there they leaked around 437,500 emails which they donated to non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets. Following that, the hacking collective hacked and leaked 87,500 emails from an engineering firm Neocom Geoservice, which specialises in exploring oil and gas fields and providing drilling support.

In a similar fashion mentioned above, Russian investment company Accent Capital had its computer systems hacked and its 365,000 letters leaked online.

The hacking collective leaked 82GB of emails from Australian police in protest of that country's offshore detention of refugees.

On May 9, 2022, which is the Victory Day in Russia, the video-hosting website RuTube was taken down through cyberattacks, which Anonymous had claimed responsibility later. Furthermore, Network Battalion 65 (NB65), a hacktivist group affiliated with Anonymous, has reportedly hacked Russian payment processor Qiwi. A total of 10.5 terabytes of data including transaction records and customers' credit cards had been exfiltrated. They further infected Qiwi with ransomwares and threatened to release more customer records.

Anonymous proceeded to hack Russian firms SOCAR Energoresource and Metprom Group LLC and dump their emails, the latter which was hacked by the Anonymous actors DepaixPorteur, B00daMooda, and Wh1t3Sh4d0w. Furthermore, Anonymous hacked into Vyberi Radio and published more than 1,000,000 emails.

DDoSecrets published 1 terabyte of data obtained from Anonymous, which included millions of files including emails, court files, client data, classified data, photographs, videos, payment information, and more from Rustam Kurmaev and Partners (RKPLaw), which was hacked by Anonymous actors DepaixPorteur and B00daMooda.

Anonymous member "YourAnonSpider" had reportedly hacked into a Russian military UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) company in which plans and tactics regarding the use of drones in warfare had been stolen.

The collective claimed responsibility for hacking Yandex Taxi on early September 2022 which sent dozens of cars to a location resulting in a traffic jam that lasted up to three hours.

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Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.

Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an "anarchic", digitized "global brain" or "hivemind". Anonymous members (known as anons) can sometimes be distinguished in public by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks in the style portrayed in the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta. Some anons also opt to mask their voices through voice changers or text-to-speech programs.

Dozens of people have been arrested for involvement in Anonymous cyberattacks in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, India, and Turkey. Evaluations of the group's actions and effectiveness vary widely. Supporters have called the group "freedom fighters" and digital Robin Hoods, while critics have described them as "a cyber lynch-mob" or "cyber terrorists". In 2012, Time called Anonymous one of the "100 most influential people" in the world. Anonymous' media profile diminished by 2018, but the group re-emerged in 2020 to support the George Floyd protests and other causes.

Internal dissent is also a regular feature of the group. A website associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives". Gabriella Coleman writes of the group: "In some ways, it may be impossible to gauge the intent and motive of thousands of participants, many of who don't even bother to leave a trace of their thoughts, motivations, and reactions. Among those that do, opinions vary considerably."

Broadly speaking, Anons oppose Internet censorship and control and the majority of their actions target governments, organizations, and corporations that they accuse of censorship. Anons were early supporters of the global Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. Since 2008, a frequent subject of disagreement within Anonymous is whether members should focus on pranking and entertainment or more serious (and, in some cases, political) activism.

Because Anonymous has no leadership, no action can be attributed to the membership as a whole. Parmy Olson and others have criticized media coverage that presents the group as well-organized or homogeneous; Olson writes, "There was no single leader pulling the levers, but a few organizational minds that sometimes pooled together to start planning a stunt." Some members protest using legal means, while others employ illegal measures such as DDoS attacks and hacking. Membership is open to anyone who wishes to state they are a member of the collective; British journalist Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer compared the group's decentralized structure to that of al-Qaeda: "If you believe in Anonymous, and call yourself Anonymous, you are Anonymous." Olson, who formerly described Anonymous as a "brand", stated in 2012 that she now characterized it as a "movement" rather than a group: "anyone can be part of it. It is a crowd of people, a nebulous crowd of people, working together and doing things together for various purposes."

The group's few rules include not disclosing one's identity, not talking about the group, and not attacking media. Members commonly use the tagline "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." Brian Kelly writes that three of the group's key characteristics are "(1) an unrelenting moral stance on issues and rights, regardless of direct provocation; (2) a physical presence that accompanies online hacking activity; and (3) a distinctive brand."

Journalists have commented that Anonymous' secrecy, fabrications, and media awareness pose an unusual challenge for reporting on the group's actions and motivations. Quinn Norton of Wired writes that: "Anons lie when they have no reason to lie. They weave vast fabrications as a form of performance. Then they tell the truth at unexpected and unfortunate times, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. They are unpredictable." Norton states that the difficulties in reporting on the group cause most writers, including herself, to focus on the "small groups of hackers who stole the limelight from a legion, defied their values, and crashed violently into the law" rather than "Anonymous’s sea of voices, all experimenting with new ways of being in the world".

The name Anonymous itself is inspired by the perceived anonymity under which users post images and comments on the Internet. Usage of the term Anonymous in the sense of a shared identity began on imageboards, particularly the /b/ board of 4chan, dedicated to random content and to raiding other websites. A tag of Anonymous is assigned to visitors who leave comments without identifying the originator of the posted content. Users of imageboards sometimes jokingly acted as if Anonymous was a single individual. The concept of the Anonymous entity advanced in 2004 when an administrator on the 4chan image board activated a "Forced_Anon" protocol that signed all posts as Anonymous. As the popularity of imageboards increased, the idea of Anonymous as a collective of unnamed individuals became an Internet meme.

Users of 4chan's /b/ board would occasionally join into mass pranks or raids. In a raid on July 12, 2006, for example, large numbers of 4chan readers invaded the Finnish social networking site Habbo Hotel with identical avatars; the avatars blocked regular Habbo members from accessing the digital hotel's pool, stating it was "closed due to fail and AIDS". Future LulzSec member Topiary became involved with the site at this time, inviting large audiences to listen to his prank phone calls via Skype. Due to the growing traffic on 4chan's board, users soon began to plot pranks off-site using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). These raids resulted in the first mainstream press story on Anonymous, a report by Fox station KTTV in Los Angeles, California in the U.S. The report called the group "hackers on steroids", "domestic terrorists", and an "Internet hate machine".

Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DeGrippo, initially as a means of documenting gossip related to LiveJournal, but it quickly was adopted as a major platform by Anonymous for parody and other purposes. The not safe for work site celebrates a subversive "trolling culture", and documents Internet memes, culture, and events, such as mass pranks, trolling events, "raids", large-scale failures of Internet security, and criticism of Internet communities that are accused of self-censorship to gain prestige or positive coverage from traditional and established media outlets. Journalist Julian Dibbell described Encyclopedia Dramatica as the site "where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend." The site also played a role in the anti-Scientology campaign of Project Chanology.

On April 14, 2011, the original URL of the site was redirected to a new website named Oh Internet that bore little resemblance to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Parts of the ED community harshly criticized the changes. In response, Anonymous launched "Operation Save ED" to rescue and restore the site's content. The Web Ecology Project made a downloadable archive of former Encyclopedia Dramatica content. The site's reincarnation was initially hosted at encyclopediadramatica.ch on servers owned by Ryan Cleary, who later was arrested in relation to attacks by LulzSec against Sony.

Anonymous first became associated with hacktivism in 2008 following a series of actions against the Church of Scientology known as Project Chanology. On January 15, 2008, the gossip blog Gawker posted a video in which celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise praised the religion; and the Church responded with a cease-and-desist letter for violation of copyright. 4chan users organized a raid against the Church in retaliation, prank-calling its hotline, sending black faxes designed to waste ink cartridges, and launching DDoS attacks against its websites.

The DDoS attacks were at first carried out with the Gigaloader and JMeter applications. Within a few days, these were supplanted by the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), a network stress-testing application allowing users to flood a server with TCP or UDP packets. The LOIC soon became a signature weapon in the Anonymous arsenal; however, it would also lead to a number of arrests of less experienced Anons who failed to conceal their IP addresses. Some operators in Anonymous IRC channels incorrectly told or lied to new volunteers that using the LOIC carried no legal risk.

During the DDoS attacks, a group of Anons uploaded a YouTube video in which a robotic voice speaks on behalf of Anonymous, telling the "leaders of Scientology" that "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—for the laughs—we shall expel you from the Internet." Within ten days, the video had attracted hundreds of thousands of views.

With more than 10 thousand followers on their IRC server waiting for instructions, they felt they had to come up with something, and got the idea of a worldwide protest. Because they both wanted to use a symbol or image to unify the protests, and because all protesters were supposed to be anonymous, it was decided to use a mask. Due to shipment problems caused by the short amount of time to prepare, they improvised and called all the costume and comic book-shops in the major cities around the world, and found that the only mask available in all the cities was the Guy Fawkes mask from the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta, in which an anarchist revolutionary battles a totalitarian government. The suggestion of the choice of mask was well received. On February 10, thousands of Anonymous joined simultaneous protests at Church of Scientology facilities in 142 cities in 43 countries. The stylized Guy Fawkes masks soon became a popular symbol for Anonymous. In-person protests against the Church continued throughout the year, including "Operation Party Hard" on March 15 and "Operation Reconnect" on April 12. However, by mid-year, they were drawing far fewer protesters, and many of the organizers in IRC channels had begun to drift away from the project.

By the start of 2009, Scientologists had stopped engaging with protesters and had improved online security, and actions against the group had largely ceased. A period of infighting followed between the politically engaged members (called "moralfags" in the parlance of 4chan) and those seeking to provoke for entertainment (trolls). By September 2010, the group had received little publicity for a year and faced a corresponding drop in member interest; its raids diminished greatly in size and moved largely off of IRC channels, organizing again from the chan boards, particularly /b/.

In September 2010, however, Anons became aware of Aiplex Software, an Indian software company that contracted with film studios to launch DDoS attacks on websites used by copyright infringers, such as The Pirate Bay. Coordinating through IRC, Anons launched a DDoS attack on September 17 that shut down Aiplex's website for a day. Primarily using LOIC, the group then targeted the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), successfully bringing down both sites. On September 19, future LulzSec member Mustafa Al-Bassam (known as "Tflow") and other Anons hacked the website of Copyright Alliance, an anti-infringement group, and posted the name of the operation: "Payback Is A Bitch", or "Operation Payback" for short. Anons also issued a press release, stating:

As IRC network operators were beginning to shut down networks involved in DDoS attacks, Anons organized a group of servers to host an independent IRC network, titled AnonOps. Operation Payback's targets rapidly expanded to include the British law firm ACS:Law, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, the British nightclub Ministry of Sound, the Spanish copyright society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, the U.S. Copyright Office, and the website of Gene Simmons of Kiss. By October 7, 2010, total downtime for all websites attacked during Operation Payback was 537.55 hours.

In November 2010, the organization WikiLeaks began releasing hundreds of thousands of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. In the face of legal threats against the organization by the U.S. government, Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers, and PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa cut off service to the organization. Operation Payback then expanded to include "Operation Avenge Assange", and Anons issued a press release declaring PayPal a target. Launching DDoS attacks with the LOIC, Anons quickly brought down the websites of the PayPal blog; PostFinance, a Swiss financial company denying service to WikiLeaks; EveryDNS, a web-hosting company that had also denied service; and the website of U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, who had supported the push to cut off services.

On December 8, Anons launched an attack against PayPal's main site. According to Topiary, who was in the command channel during the attack, the LOIC proved ineffective, and Anons were forced to rely on the botnets of two hackers for the attack, marshaling hijacked computers for a concentrated assault. Security researcher Sean-Paul Correll also reported that the "zombie computers" of involuntary botnets had provided 90% of the attack. Topiary states that he and other Anons then "lied a bit to the press to give it that sense of abundance", exaggerating the role of the grassroots membership. However, this account was disputed.

The attacks brought down PayPal.com for an hour on December 8 and another brief period on December 9. Anonymous also disrupted the sites for Visa and MasterCard on December 8. Anons had announced an intention to bring down Amazon.com as well, but failed to do so, allegedly because of infighting with the hackers who controlled the botnets. PayPal estimated the damage to have cost the company US$5.5 million. It later provided the IP addresses of 1,000 of its attackers to the FBI, leading to at least 14 arrests. On Thursday, December 5, 2013, 13 of the PayPal 14 pleaded guilty to taking part in the attacks.

In the years following Operation Payback, targets of Anonymous protests, hacks, and DDoS attacks continued to diversify. Beginning in January 2011, Anons took a number of actions known initially as Operation Tunisia in support of Arab Spring movements. Tflow created a script that Tunisians could use to protect their web browsers from government surveillance, while fellow future LulzSec member Hector Xavier Monsegur (alias "Sabu") and others allegedly hijacked servers from a London web-hosting company to launch a DDoS attack on Tunisian government websites, taking them offline. Sabu also used a Tunisian volunteer's computer to hack the website of Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, replacing it with a message from Anonymous. Anons also helped Tunisian dissidents share videos online about the uprising. In Operation Egypt, Anons collaborated with the activist group Telecomix to help dissidents access government-censored websites. Sabu and Topiary went on to participate in attacks on government websites in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, and Zimbabwe.

Tflow, Sabu, Topiary, and Ryan Ackroyd (known as "Kayla") collaborated in February 2011 on a cyber-attack against Aaron Barr, CEO of the computer security firm HBGary Federal, in retaliation for his research on Anonymous and his threat to expose members of the group. Using a SQL injection weakness, the four hacked the HBGary site, used Barr's captured password to vandalize his Twitter feed with racist messages, and released an enormous cache of HBGary's e-mails in a torrent file on Pirate Bay. The e-mails stated that Barr and HBGary had proposed to Bank of America a plan to discredit WikiLeaks in retaliation for a planned leak of Bank of America documents, and the leak caused substantial public relations harm to the firm as well as leading one U.S. congressman to call for a congressional investigation. Barr resigned as CEO before the end of the month.

Several attacks by Anons have targeted organizations accused of homophobia. In February 2011, an open letter was published on AnonNews.org threatening the Westboro Baptist Church, an organization based in Kansas in the U.S. known for picketing funerals with signs reading "God Hates Fags". During a live radio current affairs program in which Topiary debated church member Shirley Phelps-Roper, Anons hacked one of the organization's websites. After the church announced its intentions in December 2012 to picket the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Anons published the names, phone numbers, and e-mail and home addresses of church members and brought down GodHatesFags.com with a DDoS attack. In August 2012, Anons hacked the site of Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi in retaliation for the Parliament of Uganda's consideration of an anti-homosexuality law permitting capital punishment.

In April 2011, Anons launched a series of attacks against Sony in retaliation for trying to stop hacks of the PlayStation 3 game console. More than 100 million Sony accounts were compromised, and the Sony services Qriocity and PlayStation Network were taken down for a month apiece by cyberattacks.

In July 2011, Anonymous announced the launch of its social media platform Anonplus. This came after Anonymous' presence was removed from Google+. The site was later hacked by a Turkish hackers group who placed a message on the front page and replaced its logo with a picture of a dog.

In August 2011, Anons launched an attack against BART in San Francisco, which they dubbed #OpBart. The attack, made in response to the killing of Charles Hill a month prior, resulted in customers' personal information leaked onto the group's website.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York City in September 2011, Anons were early participants and helped spread the movement to other cities such as Boston. In October, some Anons attacked the website of the New York Stock Exchange while other Anons publicly opposed the action via Twitter. Some Anons also helped organize an Occupy protest outside the London Stock Exchange on May 1, 2012.

Anons launched Operation Darknet in October 2011, targeting websites hosting child pornography. In particular, the group hacked a child pornography site called "Lolita City" hosted by Freedom Hosting, releasing 1,589 usernames from the site. Anons also said that they had disabled forty image-swapping pedophile websites that employed the anonymity network Tor. In 2012, Anons leaked the names of users of a suspected child porn site in OpDarknetV2. Anonymous launched the #OpPedoChat campaign on Twitter in 2012 as a continuation of Operation Darknet. In attempt to eliminate child pornography from the internet, the group posted the emails and IP addresses of suspected pedophiles on the online forum PasteBin.

In 2011, the Koch Industries website was attacked following their attack upon union members, resulting in their website being made inaccessible for 15 minutes. In 2013, one member, a 38-year-old truck driver, pleaded guilty when accused of participating in the attack for a period of one minute, and received a sentence of two years federal probation, and ordered to pay $183,000 restitution, the amount Koch stated they paid a consultancy organization, despite this being only a denial of service attack.

On January 19, 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload on allegations of copyright infringement. Anons responded with a wave of DDoS attacks on U.S. government and copyright organizations, shutting down the sites for the RIAA, MPAA, Broadcast Music, Inc., and the FBI.

In April 2012, Anonymous hacked 485 Chinese government websites, some more than once, to protest the treatment of their citizens. They urged people to "fight for justice, fight for freedom, fight for democracy".

In 2012, Anonymous launched Operation Anti-Bully: Operation Hunt Hunter in retaliation to Hunter Moore's revenge porn site, "Is Anyone Up?" Anonymous crashed Moore's servers and publicized much of his personal information online, including his social security number. The organization also published the personal information of Andrew Myers, the proprietor of "Is Anyone Back", a copycat site of Moore's "Is Anyone Up?"

In response to Operation Pillar of Defense, a November 2012 Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip, Anons took down hundreds of Israeli websites with DDoS attacks. Anons pledged another "massive cyberassault" against Israel in April 2013 in retaliation for its actions in Gaza, promising to "wipe Israel off the map of the Internet". However, its DDoS attacks caused only temporary disruptions, leading cyberwarfare experts to suggest that the group had been unable to recruit or hire botnet operators for the attack.

On November 5, 2013, Anonymous protesters gathered around the world for the Million Mask March. Demonstrations were held in 400 cities around the world to coincide with Guy Fawkes Night.

Operation Safe Winter was an effort to raise awareness about homelessness through the collection, collation, and redistribution of resources. This program began on November 7, 2013 after an online call to action from Anonymous UK. Three missions using a charity framework were suggested in the original global spawning a variety of direct actions from used clothing drives to pitch in community potlucks feeding events in the UK, US and Turkey. The #OpSafeWinter call to action quickly spread through the mutual aid communities like Occupy Wall Street and its offshoot groups like the open-source-based OccuWeather. With the addition of the long-term mutual aid communities of New York City and online hacktivists in the US, it took on an additional three suggested missions. Encouraging participation from the general public, this operation has raised questions of privacy and the changing nature of the Anonymous community's use of monikers. The project to support those living on the streets while causing division in its own online network has been able to partner with many efforts and organizations not traditionally associated with Anonymous or online activists.

In the wake of the fatal police shooting of unarmed African-American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, "Operation Ferguson"—a hacktivist organization that claimed to be associated with Anonymous—organized cyberprotests against police, setting up a website and a Twitter account to do so. The group promised that if any protesters were harassed or harmed, they would attack the city's servers and computers, taking them offline. City officials said that e-mail systems were targeted and phones died, while the Internet crashed at the City Hall. Prior to August 15, members of Anonymous corresponding with Mother Jones said that they were working on confirming the identity of the undisclosed police officer who shot Brown and would release his name as soon as they did. On August 14, Anonymous posted on its Twitter feed what it claimed was the name of the officer involved in the shooting. However, police said the identity released by Anonymous was incorrect. Twitter subsequently suspended the Anonymous account from its service.

It was reported on November 19, 2014, that Anonymous had declared cyber war on the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) the previous week, after the KKK had made death threats following the Ferguson riots. They hacked the KKK's Twitter account, attacked servers hosting KKK sites, and started to release the personal details of members.

On November 24, 2014, Anonymous shut down the Cleveland city website and posted a video after Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy armed only with a BB gun, was shot to death by a police officer in a Cleveland park. Anonymous also used BeenVerified to uncover the phone number and address of a police officer involved in the shooting.

In January 2015, Anonymous released a video and a statement via Twitter condemning the attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people, including eight journalists, were fatally shot. The video, claiming that it is "a message for al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorists", was uploaded to the group's Belgian account. The announcement stated that "We, Anonymous around the world, have decided to declare war on you, the terrorists" and promises to avenge the killings by "shut down your accounts on all social networks." On January 12, they brought down a website that was suspected to belong to one of these groups. Critics of the action warned that taking down extremists' websites would make them harder to monitor.

On June 17, 2015, Anonymous claimed responsibility for a Denial of Service attack against Canadian government websites in protest of the passage of bill C-51—an anti-terror legislation that grants additional powers to Canadian intelligence agencies. The attack temporarily affected the websites of several federal agencies.

On October 28, 2015, Anonymous announced that it would reveal the names of up to 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan and other affiliated groups, stating in a press release, "You are terrorists that hide your identities beneath sheets and infiltrate society on every level. The privacy of the Ku Klux Klan no longer exists in cyberspace." On November 2, a list of 57 phone numbers and 23 email addresses (that allegedly belong to KKK members) was reportedly published and received media attention. However, a tweet from the "@Operation_KKK" Twitter account the same day denied it had released that information The group stated it planned to, and later did, reveal the names on November 5.

Since 2013, Saudi Arabian hacktivists have been targeting government websites protesting the actions of the regime. These actions have seen attacks supported by the possibly Iranian backed Yemen Cyber Army. An offshoot of Anonymous self-described as Ghost Security or GhostSec started targeting Islamic State-affiliated websites and social media handles.

In November 2015, Anonymous announced a major, sustained operation against ISIS following the November 2015 Paris attacks, declaring: "Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down. You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go." ISIS responded on Telegram by calling them "idiots", and asking "What they gonna to hack?" By the next day, however, Anonymous claimed to have taken down 3,824 pro-ISIS Twitter accounts, and by the third day more than 5,000, and to have doxxed ISIS recruiters. A week later, Anonymous increased their claim to 20,000 pro-ISIS accounts and released a list of the accounts. The list included the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, The New York Times, and BBC News. The BBC reported that most of the accounts on the list appeared to be still active. A spokesman for Twitter told The Daily Dot that the company is not using the lists of accounts being reported by Anonymous, as they have been found to be "wildly inaccurate" and include accounts used by academics and journalists.

In 2015, a group that claimed to be affiliated with Anonymous, calling themselves as AnonSec, claimed to have hacked and gathered almost 276 GB of data from NASA servers including NASA flight and radar logs and videos, and also multiple documents related to ongoing research. AnonSec group also claimed gaining access of a Global Hawk Drone of NASA, and released some video footage purportedly from the drone's cameras. A part of the data was released by AnonSec on Pastebin service, as an Anon Zine. NASA has denied the hack, asserting that the control of the drones were never compromised, but has acknowledged that the photos released along with the content are real photographs of its employees, but that most of these data are already available in the public domain.

The Blink Hacker Group, associating themselves with the Anonymous group, claimed to have hacked the Thailand prison websites and servers. The compromised data has been shared online, with the group claiming that they give the data back to Thailand Justice and the citizens of Thailand as well. The hack was done in response to news from Thailand about the mistreatment of prisoners in Thailand.

In late 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory first emerged on 4chan, and adherents used similar terminology and branding as Anonymous. In response, anti-Trump members of Anonymous warned that QAnon was stealing the collective's branding and vowed to oppose the theory.

A group calling themselves Anonymous Africa launched a number of DDoS attacks on websites associated with the controversial South African Gupta family in mid-June 2016. Gupta-owned companies targeted included the websites of Oakbay Investments, The New Age, and ANN7. The websites of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and a political parties Economic Freedom Fighters and Zimbabwe's Zanu-PF were also attacked for "nationalist socialist rhetoric and politicising racism."

In February 2020, Anonymous hacked the United Nations' website and created a page for Taiwan, a country which has not had a seat at the UN since 1971. The hacked page featured the Flag of Taiwan, the KMT emblem, a Taiwan Independence flag, and the Anonymous logo along with a caption. The hacked server belonged to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

In the wake of protests across the U.S. following the murder of George Floyd, Anonymous released a video on Facebook as well as sending it out to the Minneapolis Police Department on May 28, 2020, titled "Anonymous Message To The Minneapolis Police Department", in which they state that they are going to seek revenge on the Minneapolis Police Department, and "expose their crimes to the world". According to Bloomberg, the video was initially posted on an unconfirmed Anonymous Facebook page on May 28. According to BBC News, that same Facebook page had no notoriety and published videos of dubious content linked to UFOs and "China's plan to take over the world". It gained repercussions after the video about George Floyd was published and the Minneapolis police website, which is responsible for the police officer, was down. Later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that every computer in the region suffered a sophisticated attack. According to BBC News, the attack on the police website using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) was unsophisticated. According to researcher Troy Hunt, these breaches of the site may have happened from old credentials. Regarding unverified Twitter posts that also went viral, where radio stations of police officers playing music and preventing communication are shown, experts point out that this is unlikely to be due to a hack attack – if they are real. Later, it was confirmed by CNET that the leaks made from the police website are false and that someone is taking advantage of the repercussions of George Floyd's murder to spread misinformation.

On June 19, 2020, Anonymous published BlueLeaks, sometimes referred to by the Twitter hashtag #BlueLeaks, 269.21 gigabytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data through the activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, which called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies". The data — internal intelligence, bulletins, emails, and reports — was produced between August 1996 and June 2020 by more than 200 law enforcement agencies, which provided it to fusion centers. It was obtained through a security breach of Netsential, a web developer that works with fusion centers and law enforcement. In Maine, legislators took interest in BlueLeaks thanks to details about the Maine Information and Analysis Center, which is under investigation. The leaks showed the fusion center was spying on and keeping records on people who had been legally protesting or had been "suspicious" but committed no crime.

In 2020, Anonymous started cyber-attacks against the Nigerian government. They started the operation to support the #EndSARS movement in Nigeria. The group's attacks were tweeted by a member of Anonymous called LiteMods. The websites of EFCC, INEC and various other Nigerian government websites were taken-down with DDoS attacks. The websites of some banks were compromised.

The Texas Heartbeat Act, a law which bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, came into effect in Texas on September 1, 2021. The law relies on private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone who performs or induces an abortion, or aids and abets one, once "cardiac activity" in an embryo can be detected via transvaginal ultrasound, which is usually possible beginning at around six weeks of pregnancy. Shortly after the law came into effect, anti-abortion organizations set up websites to collect "whistleblower" reports of suspected violators of the bill.

On September 3, Anonymous announced "Operation Jane", a campaign focused on stymying those who attempted to enforce the law by "exhaust the investigational resources of bounty hunters, their snitch sites, and online gathering spaces until no one is able to maintain data integrity". On September 11, the group hacked the website of the Republican Party of Texas, replacing it with text about Anonymous, an invitation to join Operation Jane, and a Planned Parenthood donation link.

On September 13, Anonymous released a large quantity of private data belonging to Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content. Epik had briefly provided services to an abortion "whistleblower" website run by the anti-abortion Texas Right to Life organization, but the reporting form went offline on September 4 after Epik told the group they had violated their terms of service by collecting private information about third parties. The data included domain purchase and transfer details, account credentials and logins, payment history, employee emails, and unidentified private keys. The hackers claimed they had obtained "a decade's worth of data" which included all customers and all domains ever hosted or registered through the company, and which included poorly encrypted passwords and other sensitive data stored in plaintext. Later on September 13, the Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) organization said they were working to curate the allegedly leaked data for more accessible download, and said that it consisted of "180 gigabytes of user, registration, forwarding and other information". Publications including The Daily Dot and The Record by Recorded Future subsequently confirmed the veracity of the hack and the types of data that had been exposed. Anonymous released another leak on September 29, this time publishing bootable disk images of Epik's servers; more disk images as well as some leaked documents from the Republican Party of Texas appeared on October 4.

On February 25, 2022, Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous declared that they had launched a 'cyber operations' against the Russian Federation, in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The group later temporarily disabled websites such as RT.com and the website of the Defence Ministry along with other state owned websites. Anonymous also leaked 200 GB worth of emails from the Belarusian weapons manufacturer Tetraedr, which provided logistical support for Russia in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Anonymous also hacked into Russian TV channels and played Ukrainian music through them and showed uncensored news of events in Ukraine.

On March 7, 2022, Anonymous actors DepaixPorteur and TheWarriorPoetz declared on Twitter that they hacked 400 Russian surveillance cameras and broadcast them on a website. They call this operation "Russian Camera Dump".

Between March 25, 2022 and June 1, 2022, DDoSecrets hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes and millions of emails allegedly from the Central Bank of Russia, Capital Legal Services, All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), Aerogas, Blagoveshchensk City Administration, Continent Express, Gazregion, GUOV i GS - General Dept. of Troops and Civil Construction, Accent Capital, ALET/АЛЕТ, CorpMSP, Nikolai M. Knipovich Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (PINRO), the Achinsk City Government, SOCAR Energoresource, Metprom Group LLC, and the Vyberi Radio / Выбери Радио group which were allegedly hacked by Anonymous and Anonymous aligned NB65.

Anonymous launched a cyber operation against the Iranian government for the alleged murder of Mahsa Amini. Anonymous launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against Iran's government and state-owned websites. On September 22, 2022, the official website of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was defaced and taken down by a hacktivist named YourAnonSpider. On September 23, 2022, a hacktivist named Edaalate Ali hacked Iran's state tv government channel during the middle of broadcast and released CCTV footage of Iran's prison faculities. On Sunday, October 23, 2022 that an Iranian hacker group known as "Black Reward" published confidential files and documents email system belonging to Iran's nuclear program.

In response to the 2022 COVID-19 protests in China, Anonymous launched the Operation White Paper, attacked and took down Chinese government controlled websites, and leaked some Chinese government officials' personal information.

In May 2011, the small group of Anons behind the HBGary Federal hack—including Tflow, Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla—formed the hacker group "Lulz Security", commonly abbreviated "LulzSec". The group's first attack was against Fox.com, leaking several passwords, LinkedIn profiles, and the names of 73,000 X Factor contestants. In May 2011, members of Lulz Security gained international attention for hacking into the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) website. They stole user data and posted a fake story on the site that claimed that rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were still alive and living in New Zealand. LulzSec stated that some of its hacks, including its attack on PBS, were motivated by a desire to defend WikiLeaks and its informant Chelsea Manning.

In June 2011, members of the group claimed responsibility for an attack against Sony Pictures that took data that included "names, passwords, e-mail addresses, home addresses and dates of birth for thousands of people." In early June, LulzSec hacked into and stole user information from the pornography website www.pron.com. They obtained and published around 26,000 e-mail addresses and passwords. On June 14, 2011, LulzSec took down four websites by request of fans as part of their "Titanic Take-down Tuesday". These websites were Minecraft, League of Legends, The Escapist, and IT security company FinFisher. They also attacked the login servers of the multiplayer online game EVE Online, which also disabled the game's front-facing website, and the League of Legends login servers. Most of the takedowns were performed with DDoS attacks.

LulzSec also hacked a variety of government-affiliated sites, such as chapter sites of InfraGard, a non-profit organization affiliated with the FBI. The group leaked some of InfraGard member e-mails and a database of local users. On June 13, LulzSec released the e-mails and passwords of a number of users of senate.gov, the website of the U.S. Senate. On June 15, LulzSec launched an attack on cia.gov, the public website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, taking the website offline for several hours with a distributed denial-of-service attack. On December 2, an offshoot of LulzSec calling itself LulzSec Portugal attacked several sites related to the government of Portugal. The websites for the Bank of Portugal, the Assembly of the Republic, and the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Development all became unavailable for a few hours.

On June 26, 2011, the core LulzSec group announced it had reached the end of its "50 days of lulz" and was ceasing operations. Sabu, however, had already been secretly arrested on June 7 and then released to work as an FBI informant. His cooperation led to the arrests of Ryan Cleary, James Jeffery, and others. Tflow was arrested on July 19, 2011, Topiary was arrested on July 27, and Kayla was arrested on March 6, 2012. Topiary, Kayla, Tflow, and Cleary pleaded guilty in April 2013 and were scheduled to be sentenced in May 2013. In April 2013, Australian police arrested the alleged LulzSec leader Aush0k, but subsequent prosecutions failed to establish police claims.

Beginning in June 2011, hackers from Anonymous and LulzSec collaborated on a series of cyber attacks known as "Operation AntiSec". On June 23, in retaliation for the passage of the immigration enforcement bill Arizona SB 1070, LulzSec released a cache of documents from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, including the personal information and home addresses of many law enforcement officers. On June 22, LulzSec Brazil took down the websites of the Government of Brazil and the President of Brazil. Later data dumps included the names, addresses, phone numbers, Internet passwords, and Social Security numbers of police officers in Arizona, Missouri, and Alabama. AntiSec members also stole police officer credit card information to make donations to various causes.

On July 18, LulzSec hacked into and vandalized the website of British newspaper The Sun in response to a phone-hacking scandal. Other targets of AntiSec actions have included FBI contractor ManTech International, computer security firm Vanguard Defense Industries, and defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, releasing 90,000 military e-mail accounts and their passwords from the latter.

In December 2011, AntiSec member "sup_g" (alleged by the U.S. government to be Jeremy Hammond) and others hacked Stratfor, a U.S.-based intelligence company, vandalizing its web page and publishing 30,000 credit card numbers from its databases. AntiSec later released millions of the company's e-mails to Wikileaks.

Since 2009, dozens of people have been arrested for involvement in Anonymous cyberattacks, in countries including the U.S., UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey. Anons generally protest these prosecutions and describe these individuals as martyrs to the movement. The July 2011 arrest of LulzSec member Topiary became a particular rallying point, leading to a widespread "Free Topiary" movement.

The first person to be sent to jail for participation in an Anonymous DDoS attack was Dmitriy Guzner, an American 19-year-old. He pleaded guilty to "unauthorized impairment of a protected computer" in November 2009 and was sentenced to 366 days in U.S. federal prison.

On June 13, 2011, officials in Turkey arrested 32 individuals that were allegedly involved in DDoS attacks on Turkish government websites. These members of Anonymous were captured in different cities of Turkey including Istanbul and Ankara. According to PC Magazine, these individuals were arrested after they attacked websites as a response to the Turkish government demand to ISPs to implement a system of filters that many have perceived as censorship.

Chris Doyon (alias "Commander X"), a self-described leader of Anonymous, was arrested in September 2011 for a cyberattack on the website of Santa Cruz County, California. He jumped bail in February 2012 and fled across the border into Canada.

In September 2012, journalist and Anonymous associate Barrett Brown, known for speaking to media on behalf of the group, was arrested hours after posting a video that appeared to threaten FBI agents with physical violence. Brown was subsequently charged with 17 offenses, including publishing personal credit card information from the Stratfor hack.

Several law enforcement agencies took action after Anonymous' Operation Avenge Assange. In January 2011, British police arrested five male suspects between the ages of 15 and 26 with suspicion of participating in Anonymous DDoS attacks. During July 19–20, 2011, as many as 20 or more arrests were made of suspected Anonymous hackers in the US, UK, and Netherlands. According to the statements of U.S. officials, suspects' homes were raided and suspects were arrested in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington DC, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. Additionally, a 16-year-old boy was held by the police in south London on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and four were held in the Netherlands.

AnonOps admin Christopher Weatherhead (alias "Nerdo"), a 22-year-old who had reportedly been intimately involved in organizing DDoS attacks during "Operation Payback", was convicted by a UK court on one count of conspiracy to impair the operation of computers in December 2012. He was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. Ashley Rhodes, Peter Gibson, and another male had already pleaded guilty to the same charge for actions between August 2010 and January 2011.

Evaluations of Anonymous' actions and effectiveness vary widely. In a widely shared post, blogger Patrick Gray wrote that private security firms "secretly love" the group for the way in which it publicizes cyber security threats. Anonymous is sometimes stated to have changed the nature of protesting, and in 2012, Time called it one of the "100 most influential people" in the world.

In 2012, Public Radio International reported that the U.S. National Security Agency considered Anonymous a potential national security threat and had warned the president that it could develop the capability to disable parts of the U.S. power grid. In contrast, CNN reported in the same year that "security industry experts generally don't consider Anonymous a major player in the world of cybercrime" due to the group's reliance on DDoS attacks that briefly disabled websites rather than the more serious damage possible through hacking. One security consultant compared the group to "a jewelry thief that drives through a window, steal jewels, and rather than keep them, waves them around and tosses them out to a crowd ... They're very noisy, low-grade crimes." In its 2013 Threats Predictions report, McAfee wrote that the technical sophistication of Anonymous was in decline and that it was losing supporters due to "too many uncoordinated and unclear operations".

Graham Cluley, a security expert for Sophos, argued that Anonymous' actions against child porn websites hosted on a darknet could be counterproductive, commenting that while their intentions may be good, the removal of illegal websites and sharing networks should be performed by the authorities, rather than Internet vigilantes. Some commentators also argued that the DDoS attacks by Anonymous following the January 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act protests had proved counterproductive. Molly Wood of CNET wrote that "f the SOPA/PIPA protests were the Web's moment of inspiring, non-violent, hand-holding civil disobedience, #OpMegaUpload feels like the unsettling wave of car-burning hooligans that sweep in and incite the riot portion of the play." Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle concurred, stating that "Anonymous' actions hurt the movement to kill SOPA/PIPA by highlighting online lawlessness." The Oxford Internet Institute's Joss Wright wrote that "In one sense the actions of Anonymous are themselves, anonymously and unaccountably, censoring websites in response to positions with which they disagree."

Gabriella Coleman has compared the group to the trickster archetype and said that "they dramatize the importance of anonymity and privacy in an era when both are rapidly eroding. Given that vast databases track us, given the vast explosion of surveillance, there's something enchanting, mesmerizing and at a minimum thought-provoking about Anonymous' interventions". When asked what good Anonymous had done for the world, Parmy Olson replied:

Quinn Norton of Wired wrote of the group in 2011:

Furthermore, Landers assessed the following in 2008:

Sam Esmail shared in an interview with Motherboard that he was inspired by Anonymous when creating the USA Network hacktivist drama, Mr. Robot. Furthermore, Wired calls the "Omegas", a fictitious hacker group in the show, "a clear reference to the Anonymous offshoot known as LulzSec". In the TV series Elementary a hacktivist collective called "Everyone" plays a recurring role; there are several hints and similarities to Anonymous.