Twitter did not have a good day yesterday. The service had several random outages throughout the day, and there seemed to be no real explanation provided until everything had been returned to normal. Twitter gave its own explanation for the issue but it would seem that it may have been spurred on by something else. Twitter called the problem a "cascaded bug", though a hacker collective known as UGNazi would seem to disagree. They claim to have been part of a group which took Twitter down for 40 minutes worldwide. How did they distribute this information, though? Via Twitter, unsurprisingly.
The group UGNazi seems to be relatively new, for they have no real coverage applied to their name until now. At the moment there are five known members, all made clear by their website. As expected they go by pseudonyms: JoshTheGod, Cosmo, IonCuber, GrimTheGod, and MrOsama. Their name focuses on Nazism and the Third Reich, as does their Twitter profile picture (a cartoon image of Adolf Hitler). Interestingly their webpage is headed with the words "Welcome Nazis", though it does not necessarily indicate that they are Neo-Nazi or right wing. It is possible they chose their name and identification to be as offensive or tasteless as possible to further their own agenda.
UGNazi"s profile image, and seemingly their "logo" of sorts.
Their web page also lists "Targets" and "Reasons" to help justify their actions. Their targets are listed for various reasons. Like many hacking fraternities they seem to want to appear humanitarian, attacking 4Chan due to its apparent numbers of "pedophiles". They also want to attack the stock market, listing Naqdaq as one of their targets. Among other reasons several sites appear due to SOPA support in the past, but WePay is also targeted with the explanation of "more credit cards for us". Like most of these groups, their goals seem to be anti-authoritarian again, with another target being listed as "BP.com", or British Petroleum, since they apparently control the oil prices worldwide.
Their site seems to be Russian, since they give the domain as .ru. This may not be surprising due to a large number of computer hackers operating out of Russia for various reasons. The LinkedIn password breach was first covered on a Russian message board where the passwords were openly shared among members. Their Twitter page gives their location as "New York City", so their actual location could be difficult to identify. The group"s members also operate their own Twitter accounts and have retweeted media coverage of the actions they have taken claim for.
Their ideology could be called into question for one of their tweets makes use of a hashtag reading "#OpHolocaust", and they describe a person as being a "pro-woman Jewish whore". The group"s history may not be as illustrious as other hacking groups, though their Twitter profile indicates that they may have been more active recently than it would have appeared. For whatever reasons they have or political ideologies they hold, it would appear they"re going to try and become a regular group among hackers. Some parallels could be drawn to LulzSec, who appeared around this time last year and caused chaos online for a short period of time before disappearing again; many of their members may have been arrested though their actions online are still considered relevant.