The past few years have been blanketed by fear due to terrorist attacks across the nation. Recently, ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, launched yet another terrorist attack on Paris. This resulted in a lot of attention towards ISIS and in the midst of all of the commotion, a hidden group rose up to join the battle against them. This hidden group is “Anonymous.”Anonymous is an anarchist-type group that is commonly associated with the “Guy Fawkes” mask, and over the years, Anonymous grew in popularity due to its publicity stunts. The members of Anonymous are mostly known as hackers who use DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on governments, religious groups, and websites. Anonymous recently waged a “cyber war” on ISIS through a video that explained that they were waging “war” due to the crimes that ISIS had committed. Days after declaring this war, Anonymous claimed to have found ISIS plans of attacking the U.S.

Although this claim can be seen as very useful information, it also brings into question how trustworthy Anonymous could be. The publicity stunts that Anonymous pulled in the past give them the reputation of being a group of “pranksters,” so to speak, but at the same time, their past actions have also shown that they are capable hacking into highly secured organizations such as ISIS.

Should Anonymous be trusted? There seems to be no evidence that points to the same conclusions, but regardless of what the true motivation of Anonymous may be, a cautious approach should be taken. In fact, one of the bigger threats was one towards a WWE event that was to take place in Atlanta, Georgia. This threat was taken seriously and FBI officials had decided to take precautionary actions accordingly.

Now, this could be either a step in the right direction or another issue to deal with, but regardless of what Anonymous truly plans to do, big changes are likely going to occur. Until something major happens, there will be no real guarantee of whether the warnings were genuine or not. Though many investigations are taking place, the only thing left to decide now is the future.