Anonymous Declares Online War on Know Your Meme

Anonymous is preparing to launch a series of attacks involving spam and click fraud against Know Your Meme and plans to harras its administrators.

Know Your Meme, often referred to as KYM, is a popular website that tracks Internet memes. It was created and is owned by a company called Rocketboom.

In a manifesto posted online, Anonymous accuses Rocketboom of profiting from the work of others, namely the people who created most of the memes.

Anonymous is an infamous group of hacktivists which claim to fight for freedom of information on the Internet. The group has its roots on 4chan and even though they are now distinct entities, a lot of its members are still regular users on the image board.

4chan is considered the birthplace of most Internet memes and has played an important role in the advancement of many others, such as the LOLcat phenomenon.

Anonymous considers that by generating profits from memes, Rocketboom is effectively selling the Internet culture. It has therefore dubbed its new campaign “Operation: Stop Their Scheme.”

“[...] If their theft doesn’t enrage you, their hypocrisy should. If one of us posts a walkthrough on how to beat a game with a 5-second music clip looping in the background? DMCAs. Lawsuits. Takedows. But stealing our memes, and exploiting our efforts, and then getting rich off us is OKAY?,” the group asks.

Anonymous plans to deviate from its usual modus operandi and not use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) in this campaign, mainly because it doesn’t believe it will work.

The group’s members have instead decided to use a tool called EvilAdClicker, which can automate ad clicks in high numbers.

Coordinated attacks using this program are planned to begin tomorrow and run for an entire week. The intention is to get Rocketboom’s advertising accounts suspended for click fraud.

During this time, Anonymous members plan to register as many KYM accounts as possible and use them on December 12 to spam the website with gore and adult imagery.

Meanwhile, people are encouraged to send pizza orders at the addresses of the company’s executives and employees, make prank phone calls, fax black pages and engage in other types of harassment.