Something that has intrigued me about the Anonymous attacks on those companies/organisations and countries that are perceived to be anti-Wikileaks: the fact that members of the public are voluntarily installing a botnet client and allowing Anonymous to control their machine and direct their resources at will. The tool is called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) and is so popular it is now available for iPhone and iPad.

This post isn’t a comment on Wikileaks or on Anonymous but rather the fact that there is a big unknown risk in installing something like this on your own computer which could so easily be hijacked and redirected to another target, not Wikileaks-related or even be used as a backdoor to install something far worse.

On top of this, it needs to be pointed out that the act of knowingly participating in a Distributed Denial of Service attack is probably illegal in the UK and USA.