RECAP is software that enables users to find copies of documents you would otherwise have to pay the U.S. Federal Court to access. Read ourprivacy policy. Aaron Swartz. Because hacktivists mainly target political opponents or social issues, a group of hacktivists shares views and goals. More recently, hacktivist group Lizard Squard were responsible for an attack on the U.K.s Labour party during the countrys general election last December. Hacktivists usually target a specific government or corporation, but they might target several similar entities to express their dissatisfaction. The DDoS attacks spurred an onslaught of prank calls and blackfaxes toward the church, and Anonymous rounded out its own attack by doxing thechurch. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, Security Information & Event Management (SIEM/UEBA), Security Orchestration, Automation, & Response (SOAR/TIM), Workload Protection & Cloud Security Posture Management, Application Delivery & Server Load Balancing, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs), How to Close Security Gaps to Stop Ransomware and Other Threats, Stop or interrupt the financing of terrorism, Go around censorship laws put in place by the government, Use social media to help censored people or those whose rights are being violated, Attack government websites that try to quash political upheavals, Help immigrants get across country boundaries, Discredit or attack a governments authority. The most notable example has been from a group called Anonymous. Among DkD[||s mosthigh-profile hacktivist attacks was the defacement of a U.S. Navy server in2003 with an anti-Bush message. Defend your data from careless, compromised and malicious users. One of the defining characteristics of a hacktivist group is that they are united around some ideology, principle or cause. Disarm BEC, phishing, ransomware, supply chain threats and more. Because the second URL is not blocked by the censoring entity, the content is still available to the public. Most hacktivist groups wantto stay anonymous. Menu Close. The tools of the hacktivist can include website defacement, mass emailing, Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, Domain Name Service (DNS) hijacking, or any of a number of other methods. A DDoS attack is launched from multiple computers running specialized software that generates a large amount of traffic directed to a website with the intent of overwhelming the system so that it stops responding to legitimate user requests. Discover why 95% of organizations are moderately to extremely concerned about cloud security in 2023. A few ways administrators can protect data: Proofpoint researchers are tracking renewed distributed denial of service (DDoS) extortion activity targeting an increasing number of industries. Information leaks: Insiders with something to expose in governments or their employers In addition, law-enforcement agencies stepped up their efforts to unmask and prosecute the hacktivists, leading to the. This gap in time also leads to the emerging classification of these types of attacks, as APTs, which will be discussed in a later section. When a series of local political protests began in Tunisia in December 2010, few could have predicted that they would lead to one of the most significant upheavals of the twenty-first centuryand yet Anonymous took immediate interest. identify two hacktivism examples. On the other end, hacktivism can turn into a cyber crime when cyberattacks, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, are used to destroy computers and reputations and cost companies millions of dollars in damage. A DDoS can completely cripple an organizations productivity and revenue, so enterprises should have the proper defenses in place to detect and stop them. It was later learned that the attacks not only resulted in an outage of the PSN service but also turned out to be one of the largest data breaches in history involving over 70 million records including personally identifiable information (PII) and credit card information [9]. choose board DkD[|| wasarrested that same year. Depending on the types of documents being made public, doxing may result Deliver Proofpoint solutions to your customers and grow your business. Cyberthreats are increasing in volume and sophistication while organizations around the world struggle to fill security positions. Arguably, one of the most influential hacks of all time, WikiLeaks gained access to private emails sent between Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager. There are many different examples of hacktivism, but the largest, most successful, and most well known was Operation Sony. Regardless, there is some agreement that malware was installed on Sony's network that was designed to exfiltrate and possibly delete data from internal systems. Of course, the most recent high-profile example of activism at play is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Prevent data loss via negligent, compromised and malicious insiders by correlating content, behavior and threats. Expect us [1]. Hacking is not really an external job: it includes activities in companies or government agencies who alter their database documents intentionally for financial gains or political purposes. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks can flood your servers and take down online services. The SEA was allegedly involved in pro-Assad defacement attacks on news outlets, universities, and social media, as well as other types of attacks such as hijacking Twitter accounts to spread false information, stolen large amounts of data relating to phone numbers and VoIP users, and DDoS attacks against a range of targets (Chalbi, 2014). This often means exposing andcorrecting perceived injustices. Thank you! An example would be penetrating an air trafc control sys-tem and causing two planes to collide. Today, hacktivists and hacktivism rarely make the news headlines at all. Privacy Policy This brash subgroup of Anonymous ultimately took credit for stealing 24.6 million records in the PlayStation Network [10]. At the time of this writing there are over 80 different hacktivist groups in existence. The attack is then carried out typically including the theft of sensitive information or disrupting business operations. No amount of cyber-defenses completely remove risk, but awareness of hacktivists and their goals helps businesses install effective cybersecurity infrastructure to stop aggressive attacks. For perspective, here are some of the largest, headline-makingcases of the 21st century. More commonly, enterprises are hit as collateral damage. Firefox is a trademark of Mozilla Foundation. The new narrative, created over a period of two decades, was that of an underground, faceless army fighting together as a collective to break the chains of the old world. However, hackers performing attacks for monetary gain might cast a wide net to find any vulnerable entity to steal data. The Syrian Electronic Armyemerged in 2011 as a supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They use the same exploits and search for the same vulnerabilities. They want targets to understand their displeasure with current events or how targets conduct business. 2021 NortonLifeLock Inc. All rights reserved. Hacktivism Over Time The alleged DDoS attacks against the Bank of Greece and Central Bank of Cyprus are just two incidents in a long list of alleged and actual attacks that fall under hacktivism. As the first large-scale revolutionary movement to occur in the digital age, it was also perhaps the first in which information was the principal weapon: who had it, who controlled it, and who knew it. He co-developed popular software and code, worked on the early stages of the Creative Commons, and founded Infogami, which he agreed to merge with Reddit in 2006. Because the blogger is anonymous, the target cannot go after them. If media headlines are anything to go by, it might seem that the hacktivism heyday is over. See http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia for more information on this attack. Some of the high-profile targets of such attacks include the Westboro Baptist Church, Church of Scientology, PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa [12]. The Fortinet Security Fabric allows organizations to protect their data and resources from ransomware. Now, major commercial activities were taking place online, governments all over the world were also offering their services online, and millions of users were populating social media sites, YouTube, Reddit, 4chan and others: these communities were all ripe for recruiting people willing to participate in collective, hacktivist campaigns. In geo-bombing, a hacktivist uses the geo-location feature to allow the viewers of a video to know where it was shot. One difference is that the disruption is entirely online and conductedanonymously. These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft [6]. Team Sploit, an American group, hacked into the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority site, writing Stop the War; the Russian Hackers Union infiltrated the U.S. Navy site, writing stop terrorist aggression against Jugoslavia on a US Navy site; and the Serbian Crna Ruka carried out DoS attacks on NATO websites. Hacktivism is a combination of hacking and activism. Following the initial attack and counter-attack (which disabled Turkeys internet infrastructure for several hours), Turkish hackers unleashed an attack on at least 30 entities, including government ministries, embassies and security services as well as corporations in multiple locations, among them Cyprus, Greece and Iraq. Nina Viktoria Juliadotter, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, in The Cloud Security Ecosystem, 2015. To tone down what they viewedas fabricated news aboutthe Syrian government in 2013, the Syrian Electronic Army defaced Western newsorganizations by posting fabricated news on their websites and social media accounts. In March of 2010, Google came under attack by Vietnamese hacktivists. And it worked to some degree, as WikiLeaksreleased the logs to media outlets such as The Guardian and The New York Timesthat ran with the story. Some of the more widely known groups to have caught public attention connected with Hacktivism are Anonymous, Lulzsec, and the Syrian Electronic Army. Read how Proofpoint customers around the globe solve their most pressing cybersecurity challenges. 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