Anonymous Exposes German 'Neo-Nazis' in New Attack

In a new attack, the hacker collective Anonymous has released the names and other personal information of people from 15 "Neo-Nazi" websites in Germany. But, even anti-hate groups have come out saying that the hackers are going too far in releasing this information.

The Daily Mail reports that more than 1,000 names are posted on a new site called Nazi-leaks.net through Operation Blitzkrieg, which has been being conducted by the group since March 2011.

According to Spiegel (via Business Insider), the hackers seem to be featuring names from "alleged donors to the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), internal NPD emails, a contacts list from the right-wing weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit and customer data from neo-Nazi online stores".

Editor's note: A German reader of The Blaze informs us that some of the targets of this Anonymous campaign should not be defined as "neo-Nazi." Junge Freiheit, for example, is a respected publication of "new right" thought that could hardly be considered "neo-nazi."

Some of the information on the website is reportedly from earlier hacks, but Spiegel notes that some information is dated from Dec. 27, which correlates with a hacker conference taking place Berlin during which time some right-wing sites were taken offline.

PC World reports that the Anonymous group that conducted these actions, operating under the Twitter account @OpBlitzkrieg, seems to be lacking support not only from other factions of Anonymous itself but even supported even by some Nazi-haters:

Even Nazi haters have criticized the tactics of Anonymous, according to Deutsche Welle. Referring to Anonymous attacks that have taken some extreme right wing sites offline, Simone Rafael, from the anti-Nazi website Netz-Gegen-Nazis, told the news outlet that it was good "to remove the [Nazi] filth from the Net for a few days" but not to publish personal data on the Internet without its owner's permission.

"If some extreme right-winger were to do this, we'd be furious, too," she added.

PC World goes on to include that the Anonymous group in Hamburg called this action a "bad" idea and that one member said "The best way to handle people like Nazis is with ridicule and education."

Spiegel reports that Junge Freinheit filed charges to sue the operators of the site for what is "clearly a criminal act."

Here's the Anonymous video launching Operationg Blitzkrieg from earlier last year: