Anonymous: 10 Things We've Learned In 2013

The Anonymous hacker group continues to seek equal measures of revenge, justice and reform -- preferably through chaotic means -- for perceived wrongdoings.

Largely, however, Anonymous stays on the offensive. Indeed, this week, Anonymous also announced that it had discovered a hacker-profiling operation being run by Bank of America (BoA).

"Has mummy ever said dont play with Anonymous???" read a subsequent release from Anonymous of what the group said was 320 MB of data amassed by Allegio Group subsidiary TEKsystems. In short order, Anonymous then released, via the Par:anoia website, what it said was "a total of 14 GB [of] data, code and software that is related to Bank of America, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, TEKSystems and ClearForest."

"It shows that Bank of America and others are contracting other companies to spy and collect information on private citizens," according to an overview published on that site.

"Looking at the data it becomes clear that Bank of America, TEKSystems and others ... gathered information on Anonymous and other activists' movement on various social media platforms and public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels," it said.

Despite the data dox, an Anonymous channel on Twitter promised that the attack was centered on revenge, rather than compromising customer data or committing identity theft. "No Bank of America customer information was viewed or published at any time," it said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Todd Blaisdell.

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