Hacktivism


Hacktivism is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. A form of Internet activism with roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
Hacktivist activities span many political ideals and issues. Hacking as a form of activism can be carried out by a singular activist or through a network of activists, such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks, working in collaboration toward common goals without an overarching authority figure. For context, according to a statement by the U.S. Justice Department, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, plotted with hackers connected to the "Anonymous" and "LulzSec" groups, who have been linked to multiple cyberattacks worldwide. In 2012, Assange, who was being held in the United Kingdom on a request for extradition from the United States, gave the head of LulzSec a list of targets to hack and informed him that the most significant leaks of compromised material would come from the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the New York Times.
"Hacktivism" is a controversial term with several meanings. The word was coined to characterize electronic direct action as working toward social change by combining programming skills with critical thinking. But just as hack can sometimes mean cyber crime, hacktivism can be used to mean activism that is malicious, destructive, and undermining the security of the Internet as a technical, economic, and political platform. In comparison to previous forms of social activism, hacktivism has had unprecedented success, bringing in more participants, using more tools, and having more influence in that it has the ability to alter elections, begin conflicts, and take down businesses.
According to the United States 2020–2022 Counterintelligence Strategy, in addition to state adversaries and transnational criminal organizations, "ideologically motivated entities such as hacktivists, leaktivists, and public disclosure organizations, also pose significant threats".

Origins and definitions

Writer Jason Sack first used the term hacktivism in a 1995 article in conceptualizing New Media artist Shu Lea Cheang's film Fresh Kill. However, the term is frequently attributed to the Cult of the Dead Cow member "Omega," who used it in a 1996 e-mail to the group. Due to the variety of meanings of its root words, the definition of hacktivism is nebulous and there exists significant disagreement over the kinds of activities and purposes it encompasses. Some definitions include acts of cyberterrorism while others simply reaffirm the use of technological hacking to effect social change.

Forms and methods

Self-proclaimed "hacktivists" often work anonymously, sometimes operating in groups while other times operating as a lone wolf with several cyber-personas all corresponding to one activist within the cyberactivism umbrella that has been gaining public interest and power in pop culture. Hacktivists generally operate under apolitical ideals and express uninhibited ideas or abuse without being scrutinized by society while representing or defending themselves publicly under an anonymous identity giving them a sense of power in the cyberactivism community.
In order to carry out their operations, hacktivists might create new tools, or integrate or use a variety of software tools readily available on the Internet. One class of hacktivist activities is increasing the accessibility of others to take politically motivated action online.
Repertoire of contention of hacktivism includes among others:
  1. Code: Software and websites can achieve political goals. For example, the encryption software PGP can be used to secure communications; PGP's author, Phil Zimmermann said he distributed it first to the peace movement. Jim Warren suggests PGP's wide dissemination was in response to Senate Bill 266, authored by Senators Biden and DeConcini, which demanded that "communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications". WikiLeaks is an example of a politically motivated website: it seeks to "keep governments open".
  2. Mirroring: Website mirroring is used as a circumvention tool in order to bypass various censorship blocks on websites. This technique copies the contents of a censored website and disseminates it on other domains and sub-domains that are not censored. Document mirroring, similar to website mirroring, is a technique that focuses on backing up various documents and other works. RECAP is software that was written with the purpose to 'liberate US case law' and make it openly available online. The software project takes the form of distributed document collection and archival. Major mirroring projects include initiatives such as the Internet Archive and Wikisource.
  3. Anonymity: A method of speaking out to a wide audience about human rights issues, government oppression, etc. that utilizes various web tools such as free and/or disposable email accounts, IP masking, and blogging software to preserve a high level of anonymity.
  4. Doxing: The practice in which private and/or confidential documents and records are hacked into and made public. Hacktivists see this as a form of assured transparency, experts claim it is harassment.
  5. Denial-of-service attacks: These attacks, commonly referred to as DoS attacks, use large arrays of personal and public computers that hackers take control of via malware executable files usually transmitted through email attachments or website links. After taking control, these computers act like a herd of zombies, redirecting their network traffic to one website, with the intention of overloading servers and taking a website offline.
  6. Virtual sit-ins: Similar to DoS attacks but executed by individuals rather than software, a large number of protesters visit a targeted website and rapidly load pages to overwhelm the site with network traffic to slow the site or take it offline.
  7. Website defacements: Hackers infiltrate a web server to replace a specific web page with one of their own, usually to convey a specific message.
  8. Website redirects: This method involves changing the address of a website within the server so would-be visitors of the site are redirected to a site created by the perpetrator, typically to denounce the original site.
  9. Geo-bombing: A technique in which netizens add a geo-tag while editing YouTube videos so that the location of the video can be seen in Google Earth.
  10. Protestware: The use of malware to promote a social cause or protest. Protestware is self-inflicted by a project's maintainer in order to spread a message, most commonly in a disruptive manner. The term was popularized during the Russo-Ukrainian War after the peacenotwar supply chain attack on the npm ecosystem.

    Controversy

Depending on who is using the term, hacktivism can be a politically motivated technology hack, a constructive form of anarchic civil disobedience, or an undefined anti-systemic gesture. It can signal anticapitalist or political protest; it can denote anti-spam activists, security experts, or open-source advocates.
Some people describing themselves as hacktivists have taken to defacing websites for political reasons, such as attacking and defacing websites of governments and those who oppose their ideology. Others, such as Oxblood Ruffin, have argued forcefully against definitions of hacktivism that include web defacements or denial-of-service attacks.
Hacktivism is often seen as shadowy due to its anonymity, commonly attributed to the work of fringe groups and outlying members of society. The lack of responsible parties to be held accountable for the social-media attacks performed by hactivists has created implications in corporate and federal security measures both on and offline.
While some self-described hacktivists have engaged in DoS attacks, critics suggest that DoS attacks are an attack on free speech and that they have unintended consequences. DoS attacks waste resources and they can lead to a "DoS war" that nobody will win. In 2006, Blue Security attempted to automate a DoS attack against spammers; this led to a massive DoS attack against Blue Security which knocked them, their old ISP and their DNS provider off the Internet, destroying their business.
Following denial-of-service attacks by Anonymous on multiple sites, in reprisal for the apparent suppression of WikiLeaks, John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the EFF, said, "I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace". On the other hand, Jay Leiderman, an attorney for many hacktivists, argues that DDoS can be a legitimate form of protest speech in situations that are reasonably limited in time, place and manner.

Notable hacktivist events

  • The Cult of the Dead Cow announces the existence of the Hong Kong Blondes, a supposed group of Chinese dissident hackers working to undermine internet censorship in the PRC. Though widely reported and discussed at high levels of the U.S. government, the group was later revealed to be a fabrication intended to draw attention to digital repression and possibly to provide cover for the extraction of Chinese activists.
  • In 1996, the title of the United States Department of Justice's homepage was changed to "Department of Injustice". Pornographic images were also added to the homepage to protest the Communications Decency Act.
  • In 1998, members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater created FloodNet, a web tool that allowed users to participate in DDoS attacks in support of Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.
  • In December 1998, a hacktivist group from the US called Legions of the Underground emerged. They declared a cyberwar against Iraq and China and planned on disabling internet access in retaliation for the countries' human rights abuses. Opposing hackers criticized this move by Legions of the Underground, saying that by shutting down internet systems, the hacktivist group would have no impact on providing free access to information.
  • In July 2001, Hacktivismo, a sect of the Cult of the Dead Cow, issued the "Hacktivismo Declaration". This served as a code of conduct for those participating in hacktivism, and declared the hacker community's goals of stopping "state-sponsored censorship of the Internet" as well as affirming the rights of those therein to "freedom of opinion and expression".
  • During the 2009 Iranian election protests, Anonymous played a role in disseminating information to and from Iran by setting up the website Anonymous Iran; they also released a video manifesto to the Iranian government.
  • Google worked with engineers from SayNow and Twitter to provide communications for the Egyptian people in response to the government sanctioned Internet blackout during the 2011 protests. The result, Speak To Tweet, was a service in which voicemail left by phone was then tweeted via Twitter with a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow.
  • On Saturday 29 May 2010 a hacker calling himself 'Kaka Argentine' hacked into the Ugandan State House website and posted a conspicuous picture of Adolf Hitler with the swastika, a Nazi Party symbol.
  • During the Egyptian Internet black out, January 28 – February 2, 2011, Telecomix provided dial up services, and technical support for the Egyptian people. Telecomix released a video stating their support of the Egyptian people, describing their efforts to provide dial-up connections, and offering methods to avoid internet filters and government surveillance. The hacktivist group also announced that they were closely tracking radio frequencies in the event that someone was sending out important messages.
  • Project Chanology, also known as "Operation Chanology", was a hacktivist protest against the Church of Scientology to punish the church for participating in Internet censorship relating to the removal of material from a 2008 interview with Church of Scientology member Tom Cruise. Hacker group Anonymous attempted to "expel the church from the Internet" via DDoS attacks. In February 2008 the movement shifted toward legal methods of nonviolent protesting. Several protests were held as part of Project Chanology, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2009.
  • On June 3, 2011, LulzSec took down a website of the FBI. This was the first time they had targeted a website that was not part of the private sector. That week, the FBI was able to track the leader of LulzSec, Hector Xavier Monsegur.
  • On June 20, 2011, LulzSec targeted the Serious Organised Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, causing UK authorities to take down the website.
  • In August 2011 a member of Anonymous working under the name "Oliver Tucket" took control of the Syrian Defense Ministry website and added an Israeli government web portal in addition to changing the mail server for the website to one belonging to the Chinese navy.
  • Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the 2016 Dyn cyberattack in retaliation for Ecuador's rescinding Internet access to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at their embassy in London. WikiLeaks alluded to the attack. Subsequently, FlashPoint stated that the attack was most likely done by script kiddies.
  • In 2013, as an online component to the Million Mask March, Anonymous in the Philippines crashed 30 government websites and posted a YouTube video to congregate people in front of the parliament house on November 5 to demonstrate their disdain toward the Filipino government.
  • In 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked by a group by the name of Guardians of Peace, who obtained over 100 terabytes of data including unreleased films, employee salary, social security data, passwords, and account information. GOP hacked various social media accounts and hijacked them by changing their passwords to diespe123 and posting threats on the pages.
  • In 2016, Turkish programmer Azer Koçulu removed his software package left-pad from npm, causing a cascading failure of other software packages that contained left-pad as a dependency. This was done after Kik, a messaging application, threatened legal action against Koçulu after he refused to rename his kik package. npm ultimately sided with Kik, prompting Koçulu to unpublish all of his packages from npm in protest, including left-pad.
  • British hacker Kane Gamble, who was sentenced to two years in youth detention, posed as John Brennan, the then director of the CIA, and Mark F. Giuliano, a former deputy director of the FBI, to access highly sensitive information. The judge said Gamble engaged in "politically motivated cyber-terrorism."
  • In 2021, Anonymous hacked and leaked the databases of American web hosting company Epik.
  • As a response against 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Anonymous performed multiple cyberattacks against Russian computer systems.
  • Following the Gaza war since 2023, multiple cyberattacks attacks were seen from pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hacktivist groups. India's pro-Israel hacktivists took down the portals of Palestinian National Bank, the National Telecommunications Company and the website of Hamas. Multiple Israeli websites were flooded with malicious traffic by pro-Palestine hacktivists. Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post reported that its website was down due to a series of cyberattacks initiated against them.