Sometimes when the planets align just right and enough information trickles down from the Internet to the real world, I find myself able to carry on conversations with people who actually go outside. Fortunately for me, Julian Assange, Wikileaks.ch and Anonymous have been in the headlines throughout most of the holiday season.

Though most of the media attention has rightly been on Assange and the wealth of otherwise unobtainable information he has released, the key player in the Internet attacks was Anonymous. The group was responsible for the attempted takedown of Visa’s, MasterCard’s and Paypal.com’s websites, in response to the companies dropping their support for Wikileaks.

After the release of the embassy cables, the companies mentioned above decided to stop acting as a means for Wikileaks supporters to make donations — the organization’s primary method of generating funds, thereby hampering their operations. Anonymous, a group of tech-savvy Internet users composed mainly of teens, responded by staging a virtual sit-in the morning of Dec. 8, reports ComputerWorld.com.

The techniques used by Anonymous are at their core are as old as digital troublemaking itself, with a few noteworthy innovations thrown into the mix. The approach used by anon — the name Anonymous members give to themselves — is called a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The method works by repeatedly requesting information (usually nonsense) from the server, and, as a Slate.com article put it, “The target machine gets overwhelmed by the requests, knocking it offline for all legitimate users.”

To coordinate the attacks, it seems anon used a variety of methods and tools. Tracing the approach used by anon can be difficult, even if individual users are not so hard to catch — as evidenced by the Dutch teen who was arrested after having taken part. Anonymous usually disseminates information through the message board 4chan.org, with users spreading the information through various social networking sites.

For this attack, instructions were uploaded as images containing the famous anon logo as well as target IP addresses for the companies under attack. The key to the operation were various versions of the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon” (LOIC), an application that is designed to create misleading packets and facilitate the takedown of a server.

Mark Hofman of the Internet Storm Center took the application apart and explains it as follows: “When the ‘Fire!!!’ button is pressed, a number of sessions are established with the target server (in my test cases, seven sessions were established). The string ‘hihihihihihihihihihihihihihihihi’ is sent to the port (I assume this may be configurable) and that is basically it. The flood module cranks out multiple requests at a time and the target server gets busy.”

The childish nonsense in the message, as well as the farcical names and labels of the program used to stage the attack, is a trademark of Anonymous. Hofman goes on to say that Twitter was also used in coordinating attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. A version of the LOIC would allow you to put in the username of a Twitter account and it would pull the target IP from that Twitter account. A pre-targeted Java version of the application was also available, with the user having only to click “Fire!!!.”

Though if the attacks were composed only of the stereotypically few members of Anonymous, there wouldn’t have been much of a media outburst. The attacks didn’t (and couldn’t) outright take down the sites they were targeting, but they sufficiently destabilized online transactions so as to make them unusable for a day (or period of days, depending on where you were).

Although not confirmed outright, but supported by hearsay and overall attack effectiveness — so much so that PCWorld.com saw fit to write an article about it — a 30,000-node botnet was used in the attack, explaining the overall effectiveness.

The attacks were not meant to harm infrastructure, or even take down the websites outright. The precise targeting and choice of target were meant to create a media frenzy and draw attention to Wikileaks.

The plan succeeded, though the media attention given to Anonymous itself is interesting, as it is a group without a formal leader. To create a single description of the group is impossible, though there are some things we can know for certain.

The “group” is composed of tech-savvy individuals as young as 16, possibly younger, and centres around various anonymous Internet message boards. The users are notoriously hard to pin down, known for “trolling*” and Internet joking. A survey with data apparently pertaining to the group has been published recently, but when the answers to questions are reviewed it’s easy to see that the survey had been compromised (most users are not in fact over 60, nor do they spend more than 24 hours a day on the Internet)

Though the motives are undoubtedly political, the Anonymous attacks are less about the leaks themselves and more about Internet neutrality. The lesson that the misguided group tried to teach us was that all information should be treated equally, the Internet free for everyone to use — even if you don’t agree with what they have to say.

*Trolling is a term used to describe people who make bizarre posts or comments on web forums to incite a reaction out of other posters. Trolling can be described as a form of E-bullying or harassment, but to many, just entertainment.