After the Islamic State, the popular group of hacker-activists called Anonymous has another prey: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The group posted a video on YouTube containing a message warning the real estate tycoon after he proposed to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
After Anonymous posted the video, Trump Tower's website went down for more than one hour. One of the Twitter accounts linked to the hacktivist group confirmed that it was responsible for taking down the site.
Trump Towers NY site taken down as statement against racism and hatred. https://t.co/8iFNM7Bzqk (what you see is cloudflare offline backup)
— Anonymous (@IntelAnon) December 11, 2015
The hacking collective thinks Trump's policy will have a big impact on ISIS' recruitment.
"This is what ISIS wants. The more Muslims feel sad, the more ISIS feels they can recruit them," says Anonymous.
Wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, the speaker says the Islamic State might be using Trump's proposal as part of the terrorist group's social media campaigns to draw in more Muslims, "not just radical Muslims," to join them.
Anonymous reminds Trump to be more cautious on his statements. The group also launched its campaign against Trump named #OpTrump.
As anticipated, several people were angry about Trump's statement. In fact, in a poll carried out by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, over 50 percent of Americans are against this policy.
Trump's statement came hot on the heels of a shooting incident in San Bernardino which killed 14 individuals. The incident involved shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook whom the FBI believes "were radicalized and have been for quite some time." FBI Los Angeles field office's assistant director David Bowdich says the two premeditated the attack.
Meanwhile, the hacker-activists also declared the 11th of December as "Official ISIS Trolling Day," persuading netizens to post hilarious memes and photos making fun of ISIS. Anonymous encouraged social media users to use hashtags popularized by the members of the terrorist group in their posts. The group is convinced that this is an excellent way to drown out ISIS' propaganda on the web.
