The collective hacker group known as "Anonymous" has declared war on Islamic extremists after the recent attack on Paris-based satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The group announced that they have claimed their first victim.

Right after the attack on Wednesday, Anonymous announced its operation which was codenamed #OpCharlieHebdo. A Twitter account was created with the same codename.

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From there, Anonymous shared a video about the operation on Saturday. At the same time, it also paid tribute to the 10 magazine staffer and 2 police officers who died in the attack.

The attack on Saturday afternoon was revealed to be a hack attack on the website ansar-alhaqq.net. Previous publications - specifically a 2013 article from French newspapers - described the website as a French jihadist website.

Anonymous took the site down. A tweet followed from the Anonymous account saying, "Expect us."

Due to the efforts of the loosely organized group of hackers, Ansar-alhaqq.net was down for more than an hour after Anonymous' announcement. However, it was quickly returned online again.

The process of hacking in order to take down the site is still unclear. However, history shows that the preferred weapon of Anonymous is a cyberattack known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This consists of flooding a website with traffic.

According to security experts, while this type of attack is not a sophisticated one, there are "off-the-shelf tools" that allow almost anyone to mount something similar.

Regardless, the DDoS attacks can be used to great effect. Major websites such as MasterCard and PayPal have succumbed to outages due to these same types of attacks.

On Thursday, another affiliate of the Anonymous group - now from Belgium - published a video in support of #OpCharlieHebdo. However, #OpCharlieHebdo has yet to receive any endorsements from the more well-known Anonymous Twitter account @YourAnonNews.

For a while, Anonymous has been carrying out these kinds of attacks. They usually launch these operations in the name of free speech or other civil liberties.

"It's obvious that some people don't want, in a free world, this sacrosanct right to express in any way one's opinions," the group's #OpCharlieHebdo press release said. "Anonymous has always fought for the freedom of speech, and will never let this right besmirched by obscurantism and mysticism."

The #OpCharlieHebdo press release also told the readers to expect seeing a "massive reaction" from them.

Tagshacker, Anonymous, Charlie Hebdo, #OpCharlieHebdo, ansar-alhaqq.net, jihadist