Anonymous Now Allegedly Threatening to Take Down the Muslim Brotherhood

As Egypt prepares for an election of a new parliament later this month, one group is apparently seeing the dominant Islamic party -- the Muslim Brotherhood -- as a threat to the Egyptian revolution.

The hacker collective Anonymous has allegedly issued a threat on its TheAnonMessage YouTube channel stating that it will take down the Muslim brotherhood on Nov. 11. The video says the group believes the brotherhood seeks "to destroy the sovereignty of the people of Egypt as well as other nations including the United States:"

Anonymous recalls the brotherhood's "benevolent" founding that then turned into a "power-hungry organization" and emphasizes that its targeting the Muslim Brotherhood, not Islam:

In our collective, many of us are Muslim, yet we fight against the corruption in society and the injustice that comes with it.

The hacker group lays out a very specific time schedule for when the brotherhood will be taken down via a "Coordinated Distributed Denial of Service attack" on the Muslim Brotherhood's website (https://www.ikhwanonline.com). Here is an English version of the website, which is currently not slated for attack, click here.

A Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), according the the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, is when an attacker floods your system with information, making it difficult or impossible for you to access your network during that time, often then forcing your commuter to send data to a website. It is a "distributed" attack because many computers are being used, including the one being attacked to  achieve denial of service.

This was the same type of attack expected to be used by Anonymous against NYSE.com in October. In that attack the site seemed to falter for a moment but then returned to normal.

Some, then, have started to wonder if the almost-weekly threats by Anonymous, some that have not been carried out, are sounding like the boy who cried wolf. Gawker stated Monday that "after a month of fake Anonymous scares" it was calling the organization's bluff. It recalls that Anonymous threatened to takedown Facebook, Fox News and the Zetas drug cartel and did not make good on its word.

Then again, could it be that Anonymous isn't really putting out some of these threats at all? Gawker notes that anyone with "iMovie, a voice synthesizer and a painfully overblown prose style" can post a video with the Anonymous logo and threatening message on a YouTube channel they've created to look associated with the collective.

Anonymous has also acknowledged the fact that sometimes factions have missions of their own that aren't taken on by the whole group, which could account for why some of their alleged missions appear aren't accomplished.