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A year ago, few people had heard of Anonymous, understood what a DDoS attack was, or even realized that hackers were capable of bringing down entire networks. But as geek bloggers love to point out, 2011 was the year of the hack, the year that Anonymous became a household name and armies of its devotees took to the streets, all wearing Guy Fawkes masks like that final, mind-blowing, Parliament-exploding scene in V Is for Vendetta. Anonymous, of course, has been around a lot longer than a year -- the collective can trace its roots back to the early days of 4chan, nearly a decade ago -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who would disagree that this year was the hacktivists' watershed moment.

Or rather, series of moments. However, not every assault launched by Anonymous and spinoff groups like LulzSec and AntiSec needed to make headline news, though they almost always did. If you take a step back and look at the really big ones, though, the ones that matter, you can start to see how hackers have been pulling the strings of the marionette that is mankind lately.

The Arab Spring

We're really swinging for the fences with this one, so bear with us. Anonymous, of course, didn't break down Mubarak's door in Cairo or storm Qaddafi's compound in Tripoli, but they did work their asses off to help the protesters on the ground, especially those who'd been blocked from accessing the Internet by government firewalls. Anonymous was there from the beginning of the region's revolution in January with Operation Tunisia and Operation Egypt both of which targeted government websites in direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks and aimed to enable protesters to beter use the Internet for their cause. It's also believed that because of this, the struggling regimes targeted hacktivists in an attempt to prevent a revolution. They did not succeed. Similar operations happened in solidarity with the dissidents in Libya, Bahrain and Syria.