Joint Threat Research Intelligent Group (JTRIG), a secret UK-based spy unit, allegedly launched a cyberattack on hacktivist group Anonymous, according to documents from NSA that Edward Snowden leaked. The said documents were obtained by NBC News, wrote VentureBeat.

Based on the NSA documents, the British spy group hit Anonymous chat rooms with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. This technique usually involves hitting a target with many requests for external communication until it gets overwhelmed and becomes overloaded. The DDOS attack effectively reduced the traffic in the said chat rooms by 80% after a month, the report explained.

The attack was part of JTRIG's "Rolling Thunder" operation and was launched after Anonymous launched the same attack on Paypal and other major credit card companies in 2010 and 2011, the report added.

According to the leaked papers, JTRIG agents also posed as Anonymous members on the sad chat rooms. They obtained data on individual hackers responsible for attacks on government and corporate sites. This strategy helped convict one hacker who stole 8 million identities on PayPal, VentureBeat reported.