The Cyber Wars have become a reality. Hackers banded together under the name Anonymous to strike back at big name corporations that have withdrawn services from the website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization that seeks to make otherwise unobtainable news and information available to the public.

Recently, WikiLeaks announced the intention of releasing thousands of classified documents. The reaction to the release of these classified documents was shock and outrage by the media and government agencies, resulting in the removal of the WikiLeaks website and the incarceration of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition, companies such as PayPal, Amazon, Visa and Mastercard proceeded to no longer make their services available to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

In response to this perceived bretayal of Free Speech, internet savvy supporters of WikiLeaks banded to together to retaliate against these companies. Calling themselves Anonymous, these hackers began to enact Operation Payback, which involved assaulting company websites through "distributed denial-of-service" (DDos) attacks.

A DDoS attack can take many forms, although it generally consists of making a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. In this case, the target of these attacks are company websites that have taken steps to hinder the activities of WikiLeaks.

Members of Anonymous communicate with each other through various forms of social media and through Internet Realy Chat (IRC), although sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been taking steps to remove their presence on their respective networks.