Anarcho-Doritologist hacker collective has declared war on the New York Stock Exchange and will launch a "raid" on the company's website on Monday, October 10! Or is "Operation Invade Wall Street" a "fake planted operation"? Or maybe it doesn't really matter either way.

If you buy the video (which, if it's a "plant," is convincingly self-serious), Anonymous' plan is essentially the same as the one that briefly took down PayPal and MasterCard: Convince a bunch of people to download and run a program that will effect a distributed denial of service attack on the target, in this case the NYSE website. It's called "Operation Invade Wall Street," and will happen on October 10.

Of course, the DDoS attacks on PayPal and MasterCard ended with 14 arrests (and 14 hilarious mugshots), and a statement on Pastebin (the outlet of choice for Anonymous and other hacking groups) contends that, since Operation Invade Wall Street "proposes you use depreciated tools that have known flaws such as LOIC" (LOIC being Anonymous' (former) program of choice for DDoS attacks) and "Anonymous would never tell you to use LOIC," the entire proposal is actually "a fake planted operation by law enforcement and cyber crime agencies in order to get you to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement."

Which is, hmm, an interesting thought, but not one we really buy. If you really think that "law enforcement" has some kind of COINTELPRO thing going on against Occupy Wall Street, this would be just about the least efficient way to "undermine" the "movement." More efficient, for example: show up to the general assembly every night and bog down the meeting with bizarre demands.

But it kind of doesn't matter whether it's a plant or not because "Invade Wall Street" doesn't really make sense as an "operation" anyway. DDoSing the NYSE website would take down its public site, but it wouldn't halt trading or cripple the stock market (especially not given that October 10 is a holiday); it would be at worst a minor inconvenience for the company, as it was for PayPal and MasterCard last year, and most people won't even notice. But don't tell that to the guy with the creepy robot voice! He seems really into the whole thing.

[BetaBeat, PasteBin]