Saturday, January 11, 2014

Anonymous hacks MIT website on anniversary of Aaron Swartz suicide


The project’s webpage is still defaced as of this writing and carries the title “THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK”.




This day exactly a year ago Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit, Creative Commons and Demand Progress, committed suicide in New York city, which his family believes was because of MIT and an overzealous Department of Justice prosecution.

Anonymous defaced the website as a part of Operation Last Resort, which is in retaliation for the suicide. “We decided to hack MIT again in 2014 on the anniversary with a second tribute to Aaron Swartz http://cogen.mit.edu/ #TheDayWefightback”, read a tweet from OpLastResort.
February 14 is commemorated as a protest day “The Day We Fight Back” in honor of Aaron Swartz to highlight and draw attention to the role played by the activist in the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act.
This is not the first time MIT has been hacked as Anonymous, under its Operation Last resort, has targeted MIT two times prior to today’s hack. The first instance was just hours after Swartz’s suicide last year and the second hack, which was a rather huge one, was on January 22, 2013.

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