During this recent spell of Internet-endangering-legislation craziness, everyone’s favorite loosely organized group of Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing hackers, Anonymous, has been relatively quiet aside from some (alleged) empty threats thrown Sony’s way and a flurry of DDOS attacks following the MegaUpload takedown. Now, Anonymous has kicked it up a notch and leaked the spoils of one of their more impressive hacks to date: Audio of a conference call between the FBI and the Scotland Yard.

After a noteworthy lack of action on during the SOPA blackouts on January 18th, it seems that Anonymous is springing back into action in response to the federal takedown of MegaUpload and the subsequent arrest and likely extradition of Kim Dotcom. Just hours after the news that the U.S. federal government took down MegaUpload alongside an indictment on piracy charges, Universal.com and Justice.gov have gone down, and a prominent Anonymous affiliated Twitter account is claiming responsibility.

An Anonymous-branded message threatening Sony and a handful of celebrities has surfaced and calls for attacks on the target parties as retaliation for their collective support of SOPA. The message announces that Anonymous will “destroy [Sony's] network,” and has “declared that [their] fury will be brought upon…Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift,” for their grievous crime. Now, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Releasing a video announcing an Anonymous attack doesn’t necessarily make said Anonymous attack real, but this one seems to be gaining some traction.

In this completely legitimate and not in the least bit sketchy video, Anonymous has announced that on December 21, 2012, they will be taking our most precious social networks, Myspace and Friendster, to name but two. This video was released today by Anonymous himself, who appears to actually be YouTube user JeffKallaus. Guys, this totally has a picture of the Anonymous question mark guy, text-to-speech synthesis, and like, it’s on YouTube. Let’s all take this incredibly, incredibly seriously and start freaking out. My Friendster, man, how am I supposed to get by without my Friendster?!

There’s a new Facebook exploit out there that showed up a few days ago, but is only just now reaching critical mass. What does it do? Not much, just post gore and pornography to the infected user’s feed, causing them to unwittingly share it with all their friends, their acquaintances, a number of people they’ve probably never met, and sometimes even Grandma. The exploit has been snowballing over the past few days, affecting more and more users directly by forcing them to post the material, and even more indirectly, those who just have the pleasure of stumbling across them.

In a series of escalating threats and schemes leading up to Guy Fawkes Day, Anonymous decided that they’d like to tangle with Los Zetas, the second most powerful drug cartel in Mexico. It all started with a video threatening the cartel. Los Zetas had abducted an Anonymous affiliate during Operation Paperstorm, and the video threatened that unless said affiliate was released, Anonymous would release some data they had regarding certain Los Zetas affiliates, including some dirty cops. That was the plan, at least. Now it seems like they’re backing down. Key word: Seems.

On Sunday night, two self-identified (as they always are) Anonymous affiliates Skill3r and Glyniss Paroubek, essentially called off the attack, acknowledging that, however things played out, Operation Cartel was going to get some people killed.

“We didn’t want irresponsible administrators to condemn participants [in the Operation] to death. We’ve discussed it extensively and and we all decided to remove it.”

Due to the excessive costs of various lawsuits and the problems of a blockcade by nearly all large credit cards, WikiLeaks has stopped leaking and is diverting all power to shields aggressive fundraising in order to get enough money to fight the credit card companies in court. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union all refused to accept donations for WikiLeaks on December 7th of 2010 and the situation has reached a particularly dire point.

While it seems that the companies engaged in the blockade have gotten what they’ve wanted, WikiLeaks doesn’t look like it’ll be going down easy. The site is not shutting down and is, instead, fundraising like crazy. On every page a “donate” window pops up and upon clicking the donate button, users are provided with several walkthroughs explaining exactly how they can donate so that the money actually gets to WikiLeaks.

In a move that we can all get behind, hacker group Anonymous has announced that they have taken down a huge cache of child pornography and released 1,589 usernames of the website’s patrons. The action came as part of Operation Darknet, which targets illicit websites that are part of an unindexed and therefore unsearchable corner of the Internet.

The server in question is owned by Freedom Hosting, and apparently services over 40 child pornography websites. The largest of these, disturbingly called Lolita City, was said to contain over 100gb of child pornography.

Interestingly, the Anonymous hack is extremely well documented.

Word on the street is that Anonymous has been testing out a new weapon that they intend on using tomorrow as a cyber component to a physical protest on Wall Street. The new weapon, called #RefRef, is intended to replace their current weapon, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC). Though designed to take down websites, #RefRef  is not merely an iteration on the LOIC but functions in an entirely new way.

Anonymous’ distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks generally employ botnets to flood the target servers with requests. While the past iterations on the LOIC have increased the number of requests in the flood, #RefRef executes a DDoS from the inside out. Instead of orchestrating an army of zombies to request the target server, #RefRef initiates a flood of processes on the target server itself. #Refref has reportedly been tested on a number of sites including Pastebin (see picture) and Wikileaks. According to Anonymous, #RefRef is to be released tomorrow in concert with physical protesters during #OccupyWallSt.

The prolific hacker group Anonymous is taking a brief breather from DDoS attacks to bring you something a little different, a Twitter app. The app, called URGE for Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter, is designed to help users “hijack” trending topics on Twitter for the purpose of helping other, Anonymous-related hashtags reach higher levels of popularity and start trending on their own.

According to Anonymous, the app was developed in order to combat the increasing inanity of trending Twitter topics and help bring more attention to the kind of things Anonymous tends to be interested in, like politics, revolutions and human rights violations. All that being said, the app is fairly simple. Like other Twitter platforms, it allows vanilla tweeting with a few added options that basically amount to automatic hashtagging.