Hackers Fail to Deliver on Promise: NY Stock Exchange Website Still Live

It looks as if the hacker collective Anonymous didn't follow through on its threat last week stating that it would remove NYSE.com -- the New York Stock Exchange website -- from the Internet on October 10. But that was not without several conflicting messages from videos over the weekend.

After a few minutes of glitch, as evidenced from the screen shot below, the site is live and fully functioning. A little after 3:30, the graphics on the home page of the site went down, although text remained. This very well could have been due to traffic of everyone else getting onto the site to see if Anonymous had come through on its word or not.

The Blaze reported Anonymous' threat last week when it addressed a YouTube video to the attention of the media stating that the government was enforcing laws that punished the "99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice unharmed, for their crimes against the people." Anonymous went on to say that the government had not enforced legal restraints against Wall Street abuse and it was ignoring Wall Street greed:

This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.

We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.

Under both the YouTube videos -- one to the media and one directed to the public -- Anonymous included text stating that the majority of the collective did not want this to happen but factions were still going to carry it out.

With all these Anonymous factions, the New York Observer poses the question "is Anonymous breaking up?"  The Observer reported that the same YouTube account, AnonMessage, that posted the initial two videos announcing the attack, posted a retraction over the weekend apologizing stating the messages didn't come from the more official AnonOps. Watch the apology video, in which AnonMessage states it was mistaken and apologizes to those who were "misinformed or dismayed by any of the two videos":

Another video over the weekend confirmed the different factions with potentially different goals within the hacker collective. AnonMessage states in this video that factions of Anonymous were in fact going to try and removed NYSE.com from the Internet:

At the time of this posting, these factions had not succeeded. The Observer sums up the the back-and-forth, conflicting videos: "this is what it looks like when a decentralized collective of Internet hackers start having organizational issues. Anonymous doesn’t really work as a faceless entity to be feared if its members start airing their group’s problems with the world."

This article was updated for clarity.