Cyber Crime: Hacktivism, Consequences, Defense, and Examples

This essay delves into the realm of cyber crime, with a particular focus on hacktivism. It begins by defining hacking and hacktivism, highlighting the motivations and methods employed by hacktivists, including Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The essay then outlines various types of hacktivism, such as website defacement, data leaks, and doxing, and provides real-world examples like the Anonymous group's actions during the Iranian elections and the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack. The consequences of hacktivism are explored, emphasizing the potential for political instability, financial losses, and reputational damage for both governments and corporations. The essay further examines the impact of data breaches and identity theft, including the exposure of sensitive information and the disruption of services. Finally, it discusses defense strategies against hacktivism, such as data encryption, least-use policies, and proactive monitoring, to protect against potential attacks.

Running head: CYBER CRIME
CYBER CRIME
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Introduction
Hacking is generally referred to an unauthorised break in or intrusion in a private
network space. The person who is performing the task of hacking is known as a hacker. The
hacker can alter the system settings, delete crucial data, steal data or take control of a system
to achieve an objective that is different from the primary use of the system. Though it is not
necessary that hacking should be used for criminal purposes as ethical hacking is also utilised
by companies to enhance their existing securities. A hacker can employ various tools like
vulnerability scanner, packet sniffer, password cracking, viruses and key loggers to gain
control of a system.
In this report, a new form of hacking known as hacktivism will be discussed.
Hacktivism is the act of hacking into a system or a personal computer to steal data or harm
the system for politically or socially motivated reason. The people who involve in hacktivism
are known as hacktivist. In this report, the idea of hacktivism will be discussed and
substantiated with examples of case related to hacktivism. A hacktivist can work solo or in
groups like LulzSec to carry out their plans. In this report, the consequences of hacktivism
will be highlighted along with an analysis of the present system’s defence against such
attacks.
A hacktivist often uses the same tools and techniques as a hacker. The most common tool
used by a hacktivist is the Denial of Service or DoS attack which can be used to disrupt
online traffic of a particular site. Such sites can be of a government organisation or a private
company. The use of Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS is a federal offence in the United
States of America.
Types of Hacktivism
1. The hacktivist can try to change the code of the governmental websites to create
errors and display specific messages to the people visiting the website.
2. The hacktivist can copy a particular government website and make a duplicate of the
same website for malicious purposes.
3. The hacktivist may mirror an illegal site so that it can be still be accessed by the
public. For example, mirroring of illegal Torrent sites are still done around the world.
4. Geo-bombing is a technique of linking a YouTube video to a google earth or google
maps website in order to force display videos of political prisoners and social activists
of those areas.

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5. Anonymous blogging or whistleblowing is another form of hacktivism where a person
leaks sensitive government data to the public in order to harm the government or play
a certain political agenda.
6. Doxing is a another sort of hacktivism where large amount of information is gathered
from a particular site and then leaked to the public or sold to other companies for
malicious or political reasons.
Examples of Hacktivism events
There have been multiple accounts of hacktivism reported all around the world. A few of
those reports are given below:
1. Anonymous, a famous hacktivism group created and set up a website that they used to
distribute sensitive information to and from Iran during the 2009 Iranian elections.
2. In 2011, during Arab spring, many hacktivism groups were involved in protests and
supported the protestors. The hacktivists provided internet connections to the
protestors despite the internet ban implemented by the Egyptian government to
contain the protests by hacking into the government systems.
3. The first of million mask march happened in 2013 where the hacktivism group
Anonymous along with their supporters marched through Washington DC and
London.
4. In 2014, a group called the Guardians of Peace or GOP hacked into the Sony Pictures
Entertainment company and stole data over 100TB in size which contained personal
data of workers and many unreleased movies.
5. In 2016, a DYN attack disrupted services from multiple websites including Amazon.
It was carried out by a group called New World Hackers in revenge of arresting
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Consequences of Political Hacking
Political hacking or hacktivism can have serious implications on the government or
the country where it is happening. The implications for Australia and all over the world are
quite dire as countries around the world have invested millions to create a secure and
networked operation environment. Being a cyber developed country Australia can get
affected in a serious way if they fail to stop a politically motivated attack. If they do not act
promptly they will lose their influence over the regional cyber atmosphere and will need to
waste more money to reinforce the defence further and repair the damaged ends. The

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researchers also estimated that during the next five to ten years, the less developed areas of
Australia will be more dependent on internet and cyber network for their growth and
development. If the government fails to protect these regions from cyber threats or secure
their environment by reinforcing the existing cyber defence, these regions will be highly
susceptible to such attacks. These areas then can be targeted by politically motivated hackers
that can lead to serious loss of revenue and property damage. These state sponsored attacks or
attacks by hacktivists will lead to political instability in Australia causing damage to both its
economy and security.
Hacktivism in today’s world creates a big embarrassment for companies and
government agencies that adversely affect them. The information leaks caused due to data
breaches or identity thefts exposes government inaptitude and loopholes which can cause
much collateral damage. In some cases as seen in San Francisco, political hackers leaked the
identities and addresses of more than 100 police officers that were deployed to stop the
protest. These created a lot of troubles for these people as protested particularly targeted
them. The Sony Corporation is another major example who gets the collateral damage of
hacktivism. In 2010, a hacker who believes in free distribution of material, created the Sony
corporation’s private key by reverse engineering and released it to the public which led
thousands of users around the world free access to the Sony’s online games and firmware
content. Sony Corporation in retaliation tried to sue the person responsible for the attack and
got the attention of many hacktivists in return. The company suffered multiple Denial of
Service or DoS attacks and a massive data breach which led to the leak of 12 million
customer credit card data, 3.5 million music coupons and 75000 music codes. The
corporation suffered a staggering $180 million in losses.
Some of the other purely political data breaches have led to tremendous revolutions
among the public. In 2011, secret Egyptian government documents were posted online which
led to a big public furore. During this thousands of protestors came down to the streets and
violence also broke out. Communication and transport services were disrupted and it created
a huge embarrassment for the ruling government in front of the world. These secret
government documents released many top secrets and transactions of the government to the
public as well as rival countries. The major hacktivism group Anonymous created a branch
hacking group known as Lulz Security or LulzSec at the same time period. The group
attacked a branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI. The FBI were
investigating the parent body Anonymous during that time. They also attacked the Arizona

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department of Public Safety due to a disagreement with Arizona’s immigration policy. The
group later hacked in to Rupert Murdoch’s personal email account and leaked all the
information in it in order to protest against the celebrity cell phone hacks done by Murdoch’s
company News International.
The biggest embarrassment comes from the leak of personal emails during politically
motivated hacking. The email chains hacked from Hilary Clinton’s email account lead to
massive embarrassment for the political leader and her supporters as the data leaked
contained sensitive and private information of the presidential candidate. To highlight one
particular point, the hacktivists leaked an audio clipping of Clinton’s fundraising gathering.
This directly affected her political campaign as it resulted in huge vote bank loss as she
suffered a huge setback to her image as a transparent political leader. This resulted in her
defeat in the elections. Such attacks on emails can make or break an election as described by
security experts. The experts say that most data leaks happens from hacking done from email
hacks. This is true as in most cases the hackers looking for financial gain target the credit and
debit card passwords that are sent from the bank via the email. Similarly if a hacker wants to
bring the spotlight or attention on some particular aspect of a company or a government,
hacking into the personal emails of the employees of those organisations are the easiest way
to get that information. For example, the attack on Sony Corporation brought forward the
most embarrassing emails and personal messages that included juicy gossips between staff,
tremendous salaries and very strange behaviour among the employees.
Defence against Hacktivism
Defence against hacking and hacktivism can be done by many different methods. In the
future many advanced methods will also come into light. The top security experts claim that
no platform or industry is safe from hacktivism. The only and most effective way to defend
against such attacks is by using beforehand monitoring. Monitoring from the start against
such attacks results from careful studying of the entire system and company infrastructure.
The more a person studies a infrastructure, the faster he is able to find the loopholes in it.
Once all the loopholes have been found, it is duty of the developer to seal these loopholes in
order to prevent such attacks. Taking preventive measures are one of the most important
mechanism to fight this problem. The more the security of a system is strengthened, the less
susceptible to attacks it becomes. The FBI and other top security agencies report that smaller

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departments and companies are being increasingly targeted by this hacking groups. Some of
the ways used currently to tackle this hacktivism threat are described below:
1. It is of prime importance to identify the important and sensitive data that is stored in
the company’s system and separate it from the less important data. The company then
should try their best to secure these very important data in other drives or outsourced
security services.
2. The government or private organisations have started to understand the data creation
process by understanding for what reasons data is created and generated. Based on
this information the government or the companies should try to segregate their data
depending on their importance or nature.
3. The companies or organisations can implement least use policies to keep the data
even more secure. The least use policies dictate that less people in a company should
be provided with access to key information systems in order to reduce the chance of
hacking and data theft.
4. The organisations or government agencies have implemented policies that has led to
the automatic destruction or deletion of useless data that is older than three years in
order to secure the current data as well as rule out the possibility of a data theft of old
files.
5. Encryption of data currently being used in a company is one of the best strategies
being used in today’s industries. The encryption of crucial data is being widely done
in organisations and governmental agencies all around the world to stop a possible
breach of data that may cost the company dearly. This encryption policy is being
easily implemented by the hundreds of security companies around the world.
6. Today’s government and corporations are increasingly adopting the preventive
measures like monitoring online activities in order to secure the cyber environment
from hackers. This can prevent potential hacking attempts and fail them due to prior
intelligence and preventive monitoring of such activities. This gives the organisation
sufficient time to prepare for such attacks that may occur in the future.
Conclusion
To conclude this essay, the two major groups that are responsible for hacktivism are
Anonymous and LulzSec. The people who hack for social or political reasons are known as

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Hacktivists. These hacktivists are quite efficient in what they do and hack in large groups to
target big organisations. In this essay, some of the biggest politically motivated hacking have
been discussed including the Sony corporation hacking, the Arab spring hacking, the Hilary
Clinton email hacks and the 2009 hacking in the Iranian elections. The biggest security
challenge as for hacktivism is the hacking of personal email accounts and servers. This
breaches are so common and has resulted in potential loss of millions of dollars from
different companies. Also the Australian states that are being increasingly dependent on the
cyber network for development are at bigger risks if not given proper countermeasures. The
main countermeasures regarding hacktivism are the use of encryption of data, securing
crucial information, limited access to important documents, deleting three years or more old
documents and files that are of no use now and taking preventive countermeasures to avoid
such attacks. The major motivation points for such hackers can be either financial gain or to
highlight a political motive. A hacktivism group can be used by a political party to gain an
edge in the elections as seen from recent examples. Overall hacking for political reasons can
be harmful to our system and is condemned by the security experts and governments alike.

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