Anonymous was rightly upset with the United States Government in 2010. The American government demanded that Wikileaks stop releasing top-secret diplomatic cables to the public. Several companies supported Wikileaks in the past but with the government now against them, they were too. They froze accounts and shut down the site’s servers at one point. The owner, Julian Assange, was furious over this. The companies in question were Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, PostFinance, and even Amazon.
[Image via Chepko Danil Vitalevich/Shutterstock.com]Anonymous was mad as well that the government would do this, but also that these companies pushed away and refused to do business with Wikileaks. In December 2010, Anonymous decided to take down both Visa’s and MasterCard’s websites. Called Operation Payback, many found it to be one of the funniest hacker attacks ever, as Anonymous showed these businesses what it was like to have business come to a halt. But things then started to spin out of control, with Anonymous taking down numerous other anti-piracy opponents along with the others with targeted DDOS attacks.