Anonymous is claiming responsibility for a cyberattack against Chinese websites — one that may also be having an impact on Internet speeds across the world.

Networks in North America, Europe and especially Asia were running at significantly lower speeds Thursday. Asia's cyber backbone was especially hard hit, seeing packet loss of 33% or more, according to the monitoring website Internet Traffic Report.

Anonymous, a loosely knit group of hackers, took credit for defacing up to 500 Chinese websites Thursday, according to ABC News.

“Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall,” reads a message left on the homepages of attacked sites.

Other messages encouraged Chinese citizens to join a revolution against the Chinese government and left instructions for bypassing Internet filters installed by the Chinese government to prevent citizens from freely accessing the web.

There was no explicit connection between the site defacements and the Asian slowdown. But Anonymous’s attacks also often come in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Thousands of connections are made to a specific server causing it to crash from an overload of web traffic.

If such an attack is carried out on a massive scale, it can have consequences for Internet speeds across the world.

An eerie, two-word message left on an Anonymous Twitter account seems to back up that theory: “Don’t panic,” with a smiley face emoticon.

I'm gonna tear out the thread one by one from your skin until your bones feel embarrassed by all the attention. — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 5, 2012

SEE ALSO: The Evolution of Anonymous

Last month, 25 Anonymous members were arrested after police in South American and Europe infiltrated the group and identified several people involved in the organization.

Images courtesy of Flickr, gaelx