78 SHARES Share Tweet

The U.S. Sentencing Commission was recently hacked for a second time by the hacktivist group, ‘Anonymous’. This time the hackers uploaded code (“Operation Last Resort") transforming the site into the classic video game of Asteroids.

In what was obviously a response attack on the Justice department’s assault on the late Aaron Swartz, the hacktivist group with their “Operation Last Resort” transformed the USSC.GOV website homepage into the fun game of Asteroids. A check in the early morning hours of January 28 showed the site being shut down completely. The USSC was pulled down initially on Friday January 25, but was fixed and back up on Saturday January 26, 2013.

The USSC is an independent agency to the U.S. Judiciary branch of government. Their main purpose is to give judges guidelines to go by when it comes to crime punishment.

Very soon after the USSC site was up and running again, it was hit again by Anonymous and transformed into the classic arcade game. After reading the phrase, “AntiSec CAEK-mode activated. Destroy the system! Controls: up, down, left, right to fire,” it would enable you to play the classic game.

This latest onslaught from Anonymous is in reply to the suicide death of Aaron Swartz. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a fine of one million dollars for opening up the MIT JSTOR library. It still is not known exactly why the government went after Swartz so harshly.

Some believe that Swartz may have been feeding information on the Justice department over to Wikileaks. This theory is highly plausible because it was the Justice department that was seeking what many called an absurd and disproportionately harsh penalty for his actions.

On January 18, 2013 Wikileaks revealed on their main Twitter account that Swartz had been in contact with Julian Assange and further stated he may have sent information to the website anonymously. Later a WikiLeaks associate by the name of Kristinn Hrafnsonn confirmed the tweets in question and said they were indeed authentic but would not elaborate on the Twitter posts any further.