Call them “Rononymous.”
A video posted online Wednesday by someone claiming to be operating under the banner of the hacker group Anonymous calls for fellow “Anons” (“Ronons?”) to attack the CNN website during tonight’s Republican debate at 8 pm ET to protest the “establishment media’s” treatment of Ron Paul.
As a robotic voice explains in the video, which combines the “Ron Paul Revolution” logo with the question-marked headless logo favored by Anonymous:
In response to the establishment media blackout of Ron Paul, and specifically to the lack of equal time given to him in the debates, we the people will be blacking out the responses of all candidates except Ron Paul in the upcoming CNN debate in Jacksonville Florida on Thursday, January 26 at 8PM eastern standard time. This is a call to all who are willing and able to join this effort to show the establishment media that we will not tolerate the continued media blackout of Ron Paul, and that we will, in return, shut down the cnn website and their live stream of the debate.
In essence, the apparent Anonymous video appears to be calling for what would be a new tactic from the group: Not a whole takedown of a website for as long as possible, as Anonymous has previously engaged in, but a sporadic, sustained, series of mini-blackouts of the CNN website — which is scheduled to be live-streaming the debate.
CNN provided the following response to TPM: “We are aware of the video in question. But we do not publicly discuss security matters.”
The description of the video also provides a list of CNN’s IP addresses and links to the “High Orbit Ion Cannon,” a freeware tool that allows users to join a voluntary botnet to overwhelm a website with traffic in what’s known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS). The DDoS and Ion Cannon are tools used in previous attacks attributed to Anonymous. TPM itself was the subject of a DDoS attack last year in what was arguably the first Anonymous attack on a media website.
People claiming to be with the hacker group have previously threatened attacks that did not pan out — including on Facebook and a Mexican drug cartel. But others identified with Anonymous recently took credit for a massive series of attacks that briefly took down websites of the Justice Department, the MPAA and Universal Music, among others, on January 19.
