Aubrey Cottle, the founder of the internet hacker group anonymous has resurfaced, so what's he up to now? Let's dive in and find out!
What is Anonymous?
Anonymous is a loosely organized Internet group of hackers and political activists that began as a collective in 2003 on 4chan, an anonymous internet chat board. Members of the Anonymous community communicate and collaborate via social network services and encrypted Internet chat rooms.
Anonymous is most widely known for its cyber-attacks against governments, government-affiliated groups, corporations, and the Church of Scientology. Individuals who wish to be recognized as part of the group wear Guy Fawkes masks in public in order to conceal their identities.
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Aubrey Cottle, The Founder Of Anonymous
Aubrey Cottle was an active user of 4chan and Something Awful in the mid-2000s, when he and others began collectively referring to themselves as "Anonymous", due to the 4chan moniker of the same name. During this time Anonymous began trolling and "raiding" other websites, online games, and chat rooms, as well as black-hat hacking: targeting Hal Turner, The Church of Scientology, and others. 4chan ultimately curtailed raiding from their platform, resulting in Cottle and others migrating to Cottle's website 420chan, an imageboard.
According to Cottle, upon being photographed by Scientologists during the 2008 Project Chanology rally, he began fearing for his family's safety. According to Cottle, he tried unsuccessfully to "shut down" Anonymous after this incident, and so attempted to generate bad press for the group so that they would lose public support. During a 2021 interview with Vice News, he claimed responsibility for the group's 2008 attack on the Epilepsy Foundation's website, where Anonymous members flooded the forum with flashing animations to trigger seizures in those with photosensitive or pattern-sensitive epilepsy. Cottle later expressed remorse for the attack and distanced himself from Anonymous altogether and with a series of arrests in 2009–2011, Anonymous' notoriety began to fade anyway. By 2018 the group had largely left the public spotlight. However, in 2020 Anonymous re-emerged following the George Floyd protests, performing the June 2020 BlueLeaks breach
What's Cottle Up to Now?
Recently, Aubrey Cottle developed a sizable TikTok following for his flashy hacking videos and clips promoting operations by the hacktivist collective Anonymous against the Ukraine war. At the height of its popularity, in 2012, Anonymous had been a network of thousands of activists, a minority of them hackers, devoted to leftist-libertarian ideals of personal freedom and opposed to the consolidation of corporate and government power. But after a spate of arrests, it had largely faded from view. But a new generation seems to be taking up the mantle. For example, earlier this year, a person identifying as Anonymous leaked hundreds of gigabytes of internal police files from more than 200 agencies in what was called the #BlueLeaks.
Cottle, a Canadian who goes by the online handle “Kirtaner,” helped popularize Anonymous more than a decade ago when the loosely affiliated group gained notoriety for its Guy Fawkes masks, online antics, and hacks. Now, he’s something of a new face of a resurgent Anonymous via his TikTok channel where he has nearly 40,000 followers.
GiveSendGo Hack
Cottle already claimed credit for hacking far-right social networks Gab and Parler now say he’s responsible for hacking the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo and leaking the details of all its campaigns and everyone who donated to them.
He is facing serious threats from those who support the “freedom convoy.”
In a Livestream on his TikTok channel, Aubrey Cottle, known online as Kirtaner, admitted he was the hacker who had taken GiveSendGo’s website offline and redirected it to a website with the URL GiveSendGone.wtf, where visitors were greeted with a video from the Disney film “Frozen.”
Cottle Raided By Ontario Police
But his brash claims of hacking may have caught up to Cottle, who said this week that he was homeless and needed money to pay his attorney after being raided by Canadian police.
Cottle told CyberScoop in an online chat that the Ontario Provincial Police on Aug. 30 “took all my equipment (multiple pcs, storage devices, phones, servers, NAS) and bagged my guy Fawkes mask as evidence.”
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