December 19th 2011 – Early in the morning Egyptian time, multiple egyptian government websites were shut down due to DDoS attacks. Responsibility for the attack has been laid upon the hacktivist organization, Anonymous in response to recent demonstrator crackdowns in Tahrir Square . Anonyopsbrazil, A Proxy Twitter account for press releases regarding anonymous, tweeted 8:24pm Eastern. “anonopsbrazil list of sites that Tango Down by Anonymous pastebin.com/rgQhumx1 # OpEgypt“.
Initially Operation Egypt was started at 1am EET December 19th and was completed with the tweet from Anonyops ”BREAKING: Egypt is going “tango down”.”
Anonymous has not stated why the reasons for hacking the Egyptian government websites, but they are frequently associated with the recent wave of global protests spiking in recent months. From events in Tunisia, Spain, and Greece, Anonymous actions are enacted through highly-organized online Irc channels that can be planned months ahead of time.
13 websites ranging from presidency.gov.eg , thinktanking.idsc.gov.eg, to cairobiennale.gov.eg have been affected and effectively shutdown. Purpose for the attacks could possibly be due to the recent retaliation of police in Cairo using live ammunition and treatment of demonstrators, such as the video that has gone viral displaying a female demonstrator being beaten and stomped Found on RT.
Altogether, Instances of violence have been recorded since the revival of Tahrir Protests on Nov. 24th and the beginning of the elections on Nov. 27th. Anonymous often tries to bring light government oppression by highlighting areas of democratic reform and public unrest by making the conversation brought to light. A total of 13 deaths have been reported in the last 4 days of protests which leads to speculation that Anonymous leads the frontlines of the DDoS attack.