Anonymous is claiming credit for hacking almost 500 websites in China. It’s a claim that’s hard to dispute since whoever did hack the sites wrote “Anonymous” on them and because Anonymous is anonymous. The messages encouraged the Chinese people to stand against their own government’s censorship efforts, which is easy for someone who doesn’t live in China to say.

China wasn’t the only victim. A bunch of sites commonly used by members of Al Qaeda were knocked offline yesterday as well. The attack was pretty crude, suggesting that it probably wasn’t the result of a U.S. government effort. The Hill suggests that the most likely scenario was a test of some other countries early efforts to test a cyberwarfare system, since, I suppose, there’s no real risk of endangering, say, trade relations with Al Qaeda even if the source of the attack was uncovered. It may also have just been an individual.