Ethical Hacking on Hacktivism

Hacktivism

What is Hacktivism

Hacktivism is the act of hacking a website or computer network in an effort to convey a social or political message. The person who carries out the act of hacktivism is known as a hacktivist.

In contrast to a malicious hacker who hacks a computer with the intent to steal private information or cause other harm, hacktivists engage in similar forms of disruptive activities to highlight political or social causes. For the hacktivist, hacktivism is an Internet-enabled strategy to exercise civil disobedience. Acts of hacktivism may include website defacement, denial-of-service attacks (DoS), redirects, website parodies, information theft, virtual sabotage and virtual sit-ins.

 A Brief History of Hacktivism

1996—The word “hacktivism” is coined by Omega, a member of the hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc).

1998—Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group of online political performance artists, hack the Pentagon, the Mexican government, and the German stock exchange to protest the clampdown on the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

2001—A branch of cDc, Hacktivisimo, announces the hacktivist community’s dedication to combat “state-sponsored censorship of the internet” in the Hacktivisimo Declaration.

2003—Fifteen-year-old Christopher Poole uses a computer in his bedroom to create 4chan.org, the eventual birthplace of the notorious hacktivist group Anonymous.

2011—Hacktivist group LulzSec’s releases private information from Senate.gov just to show it can.

2011— Servers at the NSA, the Pentagon, NASA, the Department of Defense, and other military departments are infiltrated. A hacker called sl1nk claims credit and releases formerly secured information as proof.

2012— Anonymous claims credit for infiltrating and taking down the CIA website.

2014— In what the FBI and Secret Service said was “among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against US government systems,” someone hacks the White House computer system. The FBI begins publishing numbers of hacktivism incidents in its annual reports.

2016— Information leaked from Democratic National Committee emails conspiring against potential presidential candidate Bernie Sanders are published on WikiLeaks.

Acts of hacktivism, or "hacktions," tend to fall into one or more of the following categories:

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Attacks which bring down websites or otherwise disrupt Internet activity by systematically sending so many requests to a server that it cannot handle the traffic and is rendered temporarily useless. Common examples include email bombing and web sit-ins.

Website Defacements: Attacks which change the content of websites, usually for the purpose of spreading a political message.

Internet Worms: Programs designed to spread themselves within a network, either for the purpose of disrupting activity or spreading a message. 

Source: CyberSecurityDegrees.com

Sources:

https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/political-hacking-in-the-us/

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/2410/hacktivism

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/04/29/hacktivism-a-short-history/ 

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-11/Hacktivism/hacktivism.html#