Remember Remember The 5th Of November: Anonymous Goes On Hacking Spree For Guy Fawkes Day

Remember remember the 5th of November.

A slew of sites attacked by Anonymous in honor of Guy Fawkes day certainly will.

As the blog Shiny Shiny noted, the loosely assembled hacker group went on a series of high-profile cyber attacks bringing down websites across the internet. The protests were done on the anniversary of English revolutionary Guy Fawkes’ failed plan to destroy Parliament.

Anonymous was accused of defacing the NBC website — leaving the message “Remember Remember the 5th of November” — and by the end of the day had also taken credit for publishing sensitive information from PayPal and Symantec.

It turns out that Anonymous didn’t have anything to do with PayPal or Symantec however. The New York Times writes:

“Although Anonymous’s claims went viral on Twitter and were picked up by several media outlets, it appears the attack on PayPal never happened. The 28,000 passwords actually belonged to ZPanel, a free open source hosting site. Anuj Nayar, a PayPal spokesman, said the payments company had been investigating the attack since Sunday night and concluded that there was no evidence any of its data had been breached.

“A hacker who goes by the handle HTP on Twitter took credit for a breach on Symantec and released what HTP claimed were the passwords of Symantec employees on the Web site Pastebin. A number of media outlets attributed that attack to Anonymous, but the hackers denied any affiliation with the group. Mike Bradshaw, a Symantec spokesman, said that the company was still investigating the breach but that there was no evidence that any customer data had been compromised. Mr. Bradshaw did not clarify whether employee data had been compromised.”

Computer experts also expected the “Remember Remember the 5th of November” hacking spree to target Facebook or Zynga. Anonymous has made its animosity with Zynga clear after the company made widescale layoff, but no attacks were reported.