File photo. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Shafiroff)
Hackers associated with Ghost Squad and the Anonymous collective succeeded in launching a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the official Ku Klux Klan website, the latest move from within the hacking community to bring down the Klan's glorification of "blunt racism."
"We targeted the KKK due to our hackers being up in their face, we believe in free speech but their form of beliefs is monolithic and evil," one of the hackers asserted in an interview with HackRead, "We stand for constitutional rights but they want anyone who is not Caucasian removed from earth so we targeted the KKK official website to show love for our boots on the ground and to send a message that all forms of corruption will be fought. We are not fascist but we certainly do not agree with the KKK movement. They are the Fascists and they are the Racists."
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The attack comes as the latest in an ongoing campaign against the KKK, one hackers initially launched several months ago. In the intervening time, they've managed to make quite a dent in Klan activities. As the Epoch Times reports, various KKK-controlled sites have gone in and out of service, member identities have been posted online, and recruiting efforts have come under fire as organizations like Anonymous and BinarySec continue to wage their digital battle against the white supremacist group.
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While the KKK boasts nowhere near the same level of influence as it did in its early days in the antebellum South (and elsewhere in the U.S), it remains a legitimate presence in many areas of the country. "The average American likely believes hate groups like the KKK are all but dead and gone, restricted now to a handful of secret enclaves consisting of a few dying old racist men," said a BinarySec hacker in an interview on Twitter. "But, part of OpKKK is bringing attention to the fact that these groups are not dead and are in fact finding a new life online."
But if the Internet has given new life to the Klan, it has also motivated the efforts of hacking groups such as these.
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