Anonymous doxxes family business
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Anonymous doxxes family business
An online “doxxing” by an infamous hacktivist group appears to have mistakenly identified various government officials, along with a family-owned insurance company in Massachusetts, as members of the KKK.
Anonymous posted a video documenting its hack on the KKK on a blog titled “#IntelGroup” on November 1. In the video, a computerized voice intones:
Greetings citizens of the world.
We are Anonymous.
Today we have shut down servers, gotten personal information on members of the KKK, and infiltrated your twitters and websites. And this is just the beginning. On November the 4th we will be having a twitter storm, spreading awareness about the operation. And on the 5th we shall release more than 1000 Ku Klux Klan members Names and websites, new and old.
But some members of Anonymous didn’t wait that long. Three files were uploaded to the document dumping site Pastebin and tweeted out on November 1 at 1:14 PM:
#OpKKK dox part 1: https://t.co/gzeIN6i3oz
part 2:
https://t.co/2pTeNcsgSt
part 3:
https://t.co/XFmxjIQKQb
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) November 1, 2015
These documents named multiple government officials who have vehemently denied any association with the KKK, including an openly gay mayor and another mayor who cited her interracial family and past work with Cesar Chavez as just a few reasons why the accusation was “false and defamatory.”
The Twitter account that publicized the documents, which is associated with Anonymous, has since backpedaled on them, referring to the government officials as “clearly not KKK.”
A lesser-known name that was “unveiled” in the documents is Kon Tan, a Cambodian immigrant who owns an insurance agency in Lowell, Massachusetts. The insurance agency’s phone number was released in the third document, and Tan’s son Steven says that ever since opening shop this morning, the calls have not let up. This being their first business day since the documents were released, the Tans have received hundreds and hundreds of calls (according to Steven) that have been laced with profanity and sometimes included death threats.
@Op_KKK, the Twitter handle functioning as a hub for this campaign, has denied any affiliation with the release that included the Tans’ phone number and says its dump won’t come until the originally threatened November 5 release.
This account has NOT YET released any information. We believe in due diligence and will NOT recklessly involve innocent individuals #OpKKK
— Operation KKK (@Operation_KKK) November 2, 2015
While Steven Tan said his family remains optimistic that the confusion will not affect their business because of their strong local reputation, he said they’ve had to stop answering calls from any out-of-state area code for the time being. Steven did say that at least a few of their clients have out-of-state numbers and that they may have ignored their calls.
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