#OpKKK

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Part of a series on 2014 Ferguson Riots. [View Related Entries]

Overview

#OpKKK refers to an ongoing online hacktivist campaign and a series of social media protests launched by Anonymous in November 2014 in retaliation to threats of violence made by the Ku Klux Klan against protesters during the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri.

Background

On November 13th, 2014, CBS St. Louis reported that a chapter of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan based in Park Hills, Missouri has been distributing "threatening" fliers across the town of Ferguson, where a series of anti-police protests have been ongoing since the fatal shooting of local black teenager Mike Brown in August, publicly condemning the protesters as "terrorists" and that "lethal force" would be used against "violent protesters".^[1] The sightings of the KKK fliers were reported as the grand jury is expected to deliver its decision on whether or not to indict Officer Darren Wilson before the end of November.

Notable Developments

In the midst of the ensuing controversy, the KKK and Anonymous reportedly exchanged several rounds of threats.^[4] On November 14th, 2014, the YouTube channel of Anonymous Australia published a video titled "ANONYMOUS #OpKKK", in which it declared the launch of a cyberattack campaign against the KKK. The video communique was briefly taken down from the site before it was reactivated on November 18th.

We are not attacking you because of what you believe in as we fight for freedom of speech… We are attacking you because of what you did to our brothers and sisters at the Ferguson protest on the 12th of November.

DDoS & Doxxing Campaigns

Soon after the video was released, an international network of Anonymous hackers began targeting several KKK-affiliated websites and social media accounts with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and hacking attempts, as well as doxxing a number of alleged KKK members near St. Louis County with their photographs and personally identifiable information, including their names and home addresses.^[5]

Hacking of @KuKluxKlanUSA

On November 15th, 2014, the KKK-affiliated Twitter account @KuKluxKlanUSA retweeted a direct message from Anonymous Australia, in which Anonymous announced that it would take direct action against the KKK.^[2] Over the course of the next ten hours, the Twitter account taunted Anonymous repeatedly, declaring it "a bunch of wannabees" and claiming that it "won't take any action".^[3] At 9:11 p.m. (GMT) on the same day, approximately two hours after it made its final tweet taunting Anonymous, @KuKluxKlanUSA was hacked. The account's profile avatar was immediately changed to the symbol of Anonymous and a post was made celebrating the success of #OpKKK.

On November 17th, the Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account @YourAnonNews declared that several KKK-affiliated websites had been taken offline, including KKK.com, UWKKK.com, AmericanHeritageCommittee.com and TraditionalistAmericanKnights.com, the last of which has been suspected of distributing the fliers in and around Ferguson, Missouri.

@YourAnonNews also released a "digital attack map" originally put together by @EastCoastAnonymous, which visualizes the geographical origins and destinations of the coordinated DDoS attacks against KKK-affiliated web servers (shown below).

November 2015 Leaks

On October 27th, 2015, a post was published on Pastebin^[12] announcing plans to reveal the identities of 1,000 members of "Ghoul Squad affiliates" and other groups associated with the KKK. The following day, the Anon Intel Group Wordpress^[9] blog published a post containing the Pastebin announcement. On November 1st, the AnonIntelGroup YouTube channel released a video titled "#OpKKK Press Release 2015," claiming that the information would be leaked on November 5th (shown below).

The same day, several Pastebin^[13]^[14]^[15] pages were created listing 57 phone numbers and 23 email addresses of alleged KKK members. In the coming days, the @Operation_KKK^[10] and @YourAnonNews^[11] Twitter feeds posted several tweets distancing themselves from the Pastebin posts, claiming that an "actual release" will be leaked on November 5th (shown below).

On November 5th, the #OpKKK campaign's official Twitter account posted a tweet^[16] with a link to the Pastebin document^[17] it had previously promised to deliver. The document includes a list of 18 Klan-affiliated online communities and social media sites, as well as the names, aliases, social media profiles of over 350 alleged members of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. According to the Pastebin post, the data was collected over the course of 11 months through the means of "human intelligence gathering, social engineering and digital espionage."