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A new activist group is drumming up recruits for a cyberwar campaign against corporate giants due to launch on Friday, 25 May.

TheWikiBoat intends to hit a high profile list of more than 40 multinationals - including BT, Best Buy, Tesco, McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Apple - with denial of service attacks as well as attempts to raid corporate systems for intelligence.

"While attacking the major companies of this planet may seem lulzy, we also wish that this operation make a difference," the group said in a manifesto for OpNewSon. "We are 'sticking it to the man' so to speak."

Would be participants in the campaign, which aims to take out targeted sites for at least two hours, are been encouraged to use the LOIC denial of service tool, a favourite with hacktivists. By default LOIC does nothing to shield the anonymity of its users, a factor that has allowed police to track down and arrest many suspected hacktivists across the world over recent months.

Previous pre-announced activist operations to take down Facebook or launch assaults against the internet's DNS structure have turned out to be damp squibs. Security firms nonetheless argue that corporations targeted as part of Operation NewSon ought to take the threat seriously.

"It remains to be seen if the hacking group live up to their claims, but any organisation which is a target would be unwise to dismiss the threat," said André Stewart, president international at Corero Network Security.

"With prior knowledge of an impending attack, they have the opportunity to pro-actively put in place additional security measures to ensure that they remain secure."

Stewart explained that TheWikiBoat pre-announced its intended as a tactic designed to rally recruits to its cause.

“It’s not uncommon for hacking groups to announce their targets, particularly when they are ahead of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack," he explained. "This enables them to ‘recruit’ like-minded individuals who support the ideology of the hacktivist group to join in on the attack. However, the majority of DDoS attacks are often carried out using an army of automated computers, called botnets, which can be controlled by a single user."

"The hacking group is planning a second stage attack, in which they will attempt to infiltrate the organisation’s network and steal sensitive information. DDoS attacks are often used as a smokescreen to hide further, more dangerous attacks, and due to the long list of potential targets, there is a high probability that they will succeed."

Additional commentary from application security firm Radware can be found here.

#OpNewSon is due to begin begin at 4pm PST. ®

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