Since February, a mysterious hacker group calling itself Anonymous Sudan has targeted dozens of Swedish airports, hospitals and banks with distributed denial-of-service attacks, ostensibly in response to the burning of a Koran in front of the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.
The so-called DDoS attacks, which push websites and services offline by overwhelming them with internet traffic, disrupted online programming at Sweden’s national public broadcaster and knocked out the websites of Scandinavian Airlines, state-owned power company Vattenfall, and defense firm Saab AB. Extensive media coverage has made the attacks — and Anonymous Sudan’s claims — a matter of public debate in Sweden.
The group behind this campaign claims to consist of hacktivists from the East African nation whose aim is to go after "anyone who opposes Islam.” But a closer inspection of Anonymous Sudan’s social media records — and data from the attacks — show that the group is neither Sudanese nor Islamist, according to Mattias Wahlen, who led an investigation into the hacks for Truesec, one of Sweden’s biggest cybersecurity firms.