A member of Anonymous, the loose collective of hackers, took credit for knocking cloud storage provider Dropbox offline and sending error messages, when in fact Dropbox claims it was merely any error on their part. Dropbox was down on Friday evening, January 10, 2014 for a few hours and a spokesman for Dropbox sent an email that said:
Today’s outage was caused during internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factor,…We apologize for any inconvenience.
The New York Times reported that:
Hackers who call themselves AnonOpsKorea, a Korean offshoot of Anonymous, said one of their affiliates, using the Twitter handle 1775Sec, was responsible. In a post on Twitter, that individual said the attack was intended to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, the renowned programmer and charismatic technology activist who committed suicide last year while facing a federal trial on charges of hacking into the M.I.T. computer network.
Assuming this was merely a hoax that allowed some hackers credit for their political agenda, it is better than hackers stealing credit card information from retailers like Target.