"No one really knows enough about how these new groups operate, their structure or their ability to withstand such stresses," says Steve Santorelli, director of global outreach for Team Cymru, a not-for-profit Internet security research company. "Are they united strongly enough by a common cause to survive or will they fragment?"

The rift came a week after Anonymous found itself linked to the disruption at Sony Entertainment's Playstation Network. The AnonOps group denied the allegations in a posted Monday on Anonops.blogspot.com, but left open the possibility that a faction within the loose-knit group undertook the operation.

"While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened," the group said in the statement, which was posted as a YouTube video and appeared to be synthesized text-to-speech. The group posited that Sony was using them as a scapegoat, since the group has targeted the company in the past. The group argued that even the claims of their involvement, and the resulting anger of PSN users, worked to its advantage.

In the end, the group's problems result from a strong facet of their operation: Its distributed nature, says Team Cymru's Santorelli, so it will be hard to fix the problem.

"Their distributed 'command' structure, like the originally-conceived Internet, makes them hard to identify and stop," he says. "It also makes it hard for them to control (the group), their messaging and their overall direction."