Anonymous claims MIT 'retaliation hack' on the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death

Progammer prodigy committed suicide following heavy-handed prosecution for stealing academic documents from MIT

Aaron Swartz (Reuters)

A series of hacking attacks occurred on the anniversary weekend of Aaron Swartz’s suicide.

The 26-year-old, who committed suicide on 11 January 2013, faced federal hacking and fraud charges after he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network.

If charged, Swartz could have spent up to 35 years in jail.

A clip from an upcoming documentary about Swartz, “The Internet’s Own Boy”, encourages viewers “to join the right against mass suspicion less surveillance” on a global day of activism on February 11 against the NSA. The film has been produced by Brian Knappenberger, a fellow internet activist.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted a memorial article on Saturday. Parker Higgins called Aaron Sqartz “a leader in the fight for a free and open Internet”.   

When Dropbox experienced an outage on Friday, hacker group 1775 Sec initially claimed responsibility for the attack as a way to commemorate Swartz.

The group tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: We have compromised the Dropbox website”.

1775 Sec then tweeted Dropbox stating that the attack was “all in honor of Aaron Swartz”.

Dropbox issued a statement on Friday, writing that the outage was “caused during routine internal maintenance” and not “by external factors”. “Claims of leaked user information are a hoax”, they noted in an updated statement two hours later.

An anonymous hacker also attacked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s website, changing a page’s name to “THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK”. 

The university has been criticised for not being more supportive of Swartz, with later evidence suggesting that MIT officials had actively participated in the young programmer’s prosecution.

A screencap of the hacked MIT site. The website has now returned to normal.

Another hacking group, the Syrian Electronic Army, hacked Microsoft’s official blog and two of its Twitter accounts this weekend.  The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) criticised Microsoft on the social media accounts, reportedly taking control of the accounts for approximately an hour.

The SEA is a group of computer hacks who are supportive of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The relationship between the SEA and the Syrian government, however, is unclear.

The hackers took control of the @MSFTnews Twitter account, as well as the Microsoft Xbox support Twitter page.  They posted on the @MSFTnews account that the “Syrian Electronic Army Was Here”. The group also tweeted a screenshot of an alleged internal company email which discussed the hacking.

The SEA told technology website Mashable in an email that they targeted Microsoft because “Microsoft is monitoring emails accounts and selling the data for the Amiercan intelligence and other governments… We will publish more details and documents that prove it. Microsoft is not an enemy but what they are doing affected the SEA.”

In the last fortnight, the SEA also took over Skype’s blog, as well as their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The SEA has previously attacked other notable organisations, including the ITV news London Twitter account and the website of The New York Times.