Hacktivism
Hacktivism is a blend of hacking and activism, where individuals or groups use digital tools to promote social or political causes. Originating in the late 1980s, hacktivism gained prominence as a form of civil disobedience, particularly when hackers targeted government systems to protest against perceived injustices. Unlike traditional hackers who may seek financial gain, hacktivists are often driven by idealism and a desire for transparency. Their actions can range from launching Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks to defacing websites or leaking sensitive information to draw attention to issues such as human rights abuses or governmental overreach.
Hacktivism has evolved in response to global events, with notable instances including the use of social media to disseminate information during protests in Iraq and Egypt in the early 2010s. Noteworthy groups like Anonymous have undertaken high-profile actions, including retaliatory attacks against extremist organizations and the hacking of governmental websites to expose classified materials. Despite significant efforts by governments to enhance cybersecurity, the activities of hacktivists raise important questions about digital security, transparency, and the nature of protest in the digital age. Their work reflects a complex interaction between technology, ethics, and activism, often challenging the boundaries of lawful dissent.
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Hacktivism
Even during the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, as volumes of personal data began to accumulate on servers around the world, computer security experts were concerned with non-authorized computer users accessing such information. These non-authorized users were called hackers; many were either hard-core computer engineers intrigued by the challenge of hacking, breaking into secured systems or criminals intent on committing identity theft, computer fraud, or worse. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, there have emerged savvy hackers who have breached secure websites as part of a broader commitment to social or political activism, generally either whistleblowers motivated by idealism or cyberterrorists motivated by uncompromising political or military agendas. Dubbed hacktivists, their potential impact on public services, government agencies, banking institutions, and military operations have raised concerns over how best to secure such sites.
Overview
Hacktivism first came to public awareness in 1989 when an antinuclear group inserted a worm into a network of government data-systems, including the Department of Defense and NASA, as a way to protest the presumption that their computer system—or really any computer system in a free society—had the right to be secured. Because hacktivists do not seek financial gain—indeed, they are most often disillusioned idealists—they represent a difficult challenge. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, as governments significantly improved their surveillance operations, the counter operations of hacktivists have become a matter of international security. Hacktivists will go to great lengths to ensure information transparency by proving that even the most tightly fortified information systems are vulnerable to attack.
Hacktivists view their actions as necessary acts of civil disobedience that are fundamental to the processes of democracy and freedom in which protest is both a right and an obligation in precipitating change when governments and corporations overstep their boundaries. Of course, hacktivists also target corporate sites—most often banks, military contractors, and environmental conglomerates. Most frequently they deploy a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that effectively shuts down the target’s Internet website. Or they deface the website with irreverent images and messages. They may spam the networks or tap into massive e-mail systems and flood the system with random messages. But, more broadly, hacktivists can also offer subversive communication systems when oppressive governments attempt to regulate or censor the Internet. Hacktivists were central in disseminating information during political uprisings in both Iraq and Egypt in the early 2010s through their deft use of social media. Hacktivists have also released protected information about human rights violations in numerous police states, thereby raising global awareness of such atrocities. In January 2015 the hacktivist group Anonymous took credit for hacking a French jihadist website as retaliation for the terror attack against Charlie Hebdo, a satirical periodical based in Paris, earlier that month. The following month Anonymous claimed responsibility for hacking hundreds of social media accounts linked with the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
More problematically, however, hacktivists have been in the vanguard of breaching government security sites and releasing classified documents on the Internet. The most notable the site to engage in this behavior was Wikileaks, founded by Australian computer hacker Julian Assange in 2006. Wikileaks was central to the case of Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence officer in Iraq who downloaded and passed on classified US government data to the website in 2010. She was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to jail. In 2013 National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden downloaded and released thousands of classified security materials to the press regarding the US government’s mass surveillance programs, because he believed that only an informed public could make informed decisions. While Snowden viewed himself as a whistleblower and had inside access to the information, meaning he did not use formal hacktivist tactics to obtain it, his actions demonstrated that computer systems are just as vulnerable to internal hackers as they are to external, independent hacktivists. Most computer engineers concede that despite several successful government prosecutions and the millions spent on creating firewalls, random acts of hacktivism remain virtually unstoppable.
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