A group of hackers is planning on a massive campaign to drop the price of Bitcoins for fun and profit.

According to a pastebin post, hackers are planning to unleash “Operation Shock and Awe”, a campaign to distribute negative news articles in conjunction with a massive sell-off and DDoS campaign on all bitcoin exchanges except one. Using this one remaining exchange, the plan is to buy up remaining coins for cheap, cheap, cheap and then profit when it goes up.

From the post:

1. 15:30-15:45 UTC – Spread bogus AP press releases to 50+ national US and British media outlets and 100+ local outlets indicating exchange site Mt. Gox under investigation by Japnese government for securities fraud, with seizure and asset freeze soon
2. 15:45-16:00 UTC – After initial publication of bogus AP press releases, spam story on reddit and upvote with sock accounts, spread panic in comments using sock accounts
3. 16:00 UTC – Several sellers lined up for a coordinated dump of 250,000+ BTC which will crash the price to under 100 to correlate in time with publication of bogus AP reports
4. 16:10 UTC – Massive coordinated http packet flood (distributed F5) from botnet of 1,000,000+ compromised machines on the following sites:
5. – https://www.mtgox.com
6. – https://btc-e.com
7. – https://www.coinbase.com
8. – https://www.bitpay.com
9. – https://www.bitinstant.com
10. – https://www.bitcoitalk.org
11. – http://s2.bitcoinity.org
12. – http://bitcoinium.com/
13. – http://bitcoincharts.com/
14. 16:30 – 17:00 UTC – During the ddos, buy only from Bitstamp which will not be included in the ddos but was included in the coordinated dump.
15. 17:00 UTC – Stop ddos, buy as much cheap bitcoin from MTGOX as possible as quickly as you can
16. 17:00 or later – Bogus AP reports will be corrected / debunked as hoax, price will rebound
17. Potential profit 200-300%

These sound like scary dudes, I think we should be very afraid.