Egyptians may be celebratingthe return of their Internet connectivitytoday, but it seems that a number of Egyptian government websites remain down as a result of a distributed denial of service attacks. Atweetfrom online protest gathering Anonymous today has indicated that it is hitting the Ministry of Information, among other departments, with a DDoS attack. Indeed, right nowseveralof the country’s government sites are unresponsive, includingmoiegypt.gov.egandmcit.gov.eg. Anonymous firstbeganattacking Egyptian government websites on 26 January, although those attacks became useless once most of country’s Internet connectivity was withdrawn....

Hacking group Anonymous has todayreleasedanarchivecontaining what it claims to be private emails and databases ofIRC Federal, a contractor that partners with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of the Army. The group calls this latest release ‘F*ck FBI Friday II’ and says that it “laid nuclear waste to their systems, owning their pathetic windows box, dropping their databases and private emails....

On Monday at 5PM PDT, protesters at San Francisco’s Civic Center BART station prompted the closure of one of the city’s busiest transit stations, after an unpermitted march drew large crowds. The civil action was been organized byAnonymous, the hacktivist group who yesterday released the names ofseveral thousand BART passengers, after hacking into myBART, an independent community site that uses BART’s API. The protests were in retaliation to BART’s shutdown of cell phone service Thursday night at some of its stations, to disrupt planned demonstrations over a police shooting....

Anonymous has been hard at work. Afterhacking into Iran’s government serversand getting away with over 10,000 email messages, they have launched yet another attack, this time targeting Middle Eastern government officials, in what the collective calls support for the Arab revolutions. As reported on Twitter, a document was released on PasteBin, asite that already bears the reputation as a hangout for hackers, revealing the log-in details of hundreds of government officials from Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan....

A civil war of sorts has been raging inside the ‘hacktivist’ group Anonymous, culminating today in a hostile takeover of the Anonymous IRC servers. The splinter group that has attempted to seize leadership of Anonymous, led by someone known only as Ryan, says that they seized control of Anonymous websites and IRC servers because they felt that AnonOps had become too centralized. Ryan also believes that Anonymous leadership had become more interested in destroying things for destruction’s sake than fighting for a cause, according to an exclusive interview onthinq_....