In honor of Trolling Day, Anonymous decided to target Donald Trump—in addition to the Islamic State—and managed to take the GOP presidential candidate's website down.
The hacktivist group released a video on Wednesday, warning Trump that his anti-Muslim policies will only help extremist organization ISIS recruit members and strengthen its cause. Trump said in a press release on Monday that the U.S. should stop admitting Muslims into the country until "representatives can figure out what's going on."
An announcer in the video said, “Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you want to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This policy is going to have a huge impact. This is what Isis wants. The more Muslims feel sad the more Isis feels they can recruit them. The more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims you can be sure Isis will be putting that on their social media campaign.”
On Wednesday, Trump's website TrumpTowerNYC.com went down for a few hours, International Business Times reported. On Friday, it crashed again. Anonymous claimed it took down the site using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a method listed in the group's three published trolling and hacking guides.
Two Twitter handles associated with Anonymous posted about the group's new focus, and its success in taking Trump down:
https://t.co/AhA1CqdXPt nearly down. we need more laz0rs! #DDoS #OpTrump #OpFire pic.twitter.com/L6mKFMpFzF
. America is not immune to Fascism. . #Trump EXPECT US. . #OpTrump is on. JOIN IN !!! . #Anonymous #AnonFamily #Anon pic.twitter.com/GZCQonQX8R
A New York Times/CBS poll revealed that Americans today are more concerned about terrorist attacks than at any other time since 9/11. As the current Republican frontrunner, Trump benefits most from Americans' fear—a fire he fans with incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Following the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, Anonymous almost exclusively targeted ISIS, but it seems as if they'll go after anyone who stands to help the terrorist group's cause—even if that man is Trump.
