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Hacktivist cybercrime
Published: April 6, 2012
Are online activists, or “hacktivists,” like Anonymous, bastions of freedom of speech, or are they more akin to criminals? The answer may depend on who you ask.
Recently, Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report reported that hacktivist groups were responsible for 58 percent of all data stolen last year. The study compiled data breach information from its own customers, and from law enforcement agencies in five countries around the world.
Last year was a banner year for hacktivists, especially the political hacker group Anonymous, whose hacks in that year exceeded the total number of hactivist attacks in all prior years.
Up until recently, most hacktivist attacks were annoying rather than serious—like denial of service (DOS) attacks that would take a website down for a few hours.
But last year, in particular, Anonymous and other hacktivists changed tactics and started hacking into data.
"The year 2011 saw a merger between those classic misdeeds and a new 'oh by the way, we're gonna steal all your data too' twist," Verizon said in its report. "This re-imagined and reinvigorated specter of 'hacktivism' rose to haunt organizations around the world."
Or at least some hacktivists behaved badly. Anonymous, for instance, is not a company and has no control over who uses its name during an attack. There are a few groups within Anonymous, and they are often in pitched battles about acceptable tactics, as shown in the recent dustup at the SXSW confab (which is another long story. Check it out. I’m not going to write about it).
But the Verizon study stated that modern DOS attacks may just be diversions. In many cases, the hacktivists would publicly announce a big attack, causing the target business to dedicate resources to stopping the DOS. While that was happening, hacktivists would sneak in unnoticed, and attack or steal company data.
This is a different tactic that the traditional cybercriminal, who is ver precise and sophisticated about what information is being sought (like credit card numbers or passwords).
Hacktivists attack companies whose policies they disagree with, so their data attacks are more political in nature and, therefore, broader in scope.
The year 2011 saw the second-highest total of data breaches recorded since Verizon started these studies in 2004. In all, Verizon said it and its partners recorded 855 data breaches, totaling 174 million compromised records.