Digital activists linked to the Anonymous collective, a disparate cohort of hackers from around the world, have claimed responsibility for a fresh wave of cyberattacks against a number of Spanish government websites as part of a pro-Catalonia protest campaign.

Multiple accounts with Anonymous' signature Guy Fawkes masks have been tweeting hashtags in recent weeks including #opCatalunya, #FreeCatalonia and #OpSaveCatalonia. They claimed to have taken several state websites offline. The website of Spain's Ministry of Public Works and Transport was hacked to display a "Free Catalonia" slogan.

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Municipal websites in Fort Lauderdale, Florida suffered a distributed denial of service attack after Anonymous promised to disrupt the city's activities following the passing of local laws outlawing the feeding of homeless people.

The attack occurred on Monday afternoon and led to massive congestion of the websites of the city and its police force, as well as the email system used by local government. The city authorities shut them down as a precautionary measure. The previous day a group claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous threatened action against the Fort Lauderdale authorities in a video.

When operation first came to light, it looked like a targeted strike against a few high value targets in the Dark Web drug trade. Now the full scope of that international law enforcement crackdown has been revealed, and it’s a scorched-earth purge of the Internet underground.

The European police agency Europol along with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security announced that the operation has now arrested people in as many countries and seized hundreds of Dark Web domains associated with well over a dozen black market websites. Just how law enforcement agents were able to locate the Dark Web sites despite their use of the Tor anonymity software remains a looming mystery. 

The British spy agency GCHQ used hacking techniques, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, against the hacking collective Anonymous, according to new documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Anonymous hackers were attacking websites with their own DDoS attacks in 2011 while authorities in the UK and the U.S. were scrambling for a response — it turns out GCHQ's answer was to turn the hackers' weapons against them. The new documents reveal that a GCHQ unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, launched an operation called Rolling Thunder against the hacker collective in 2011.

Internet experts say huge chunks of sensitive web traffic have been routinely hijacked by hackers and diverted to foreign computers, compromising the data of victims in at least 150 cities worldwide.

Researchers at New Hampshire-based global internet intelligence company Renesys say that they’ve witnessed a complex type of Man-in-the-Middle attack occur on computer networks no fewer than 60 days this year already, the likes of which they say should never have happened. The method of attack exploits a vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, and takes advantage of the fact that much of the information routed through the global system of networks.