We Are Legion: A Movie about Hacktivism and Hacktivists

For those who have not heard of the movie We Are Legion here is a quick trailer;

In order to learn more about the Networked World and Hacktivism this movie does an exceptional job in explaining all of the aspects of Hacktivism and talks about the history, present, and future of hacktivism. This post gives a quick movie review and relates to Hacktivism.

This movie takes us into the dynamic culture of hacktivism, more specifically relating the the group Anonymous. The movie starts off talking about the grass roots of hacktivism and talks about groups like; Cult of the Dead Cow, and Disturbance Theatre, and then moves on to talk about the dynamic and complex emergence of the group Anonymous.

This movie has gotten very good reviews from most critics and received a user rating score of 7.5/10 on IMDB.

This movie does a really good job of showing the development of the group Anonymous, showing and explaining that the group used to be more so for fun and considered as "pranksters" and now it is a full blown global movement.

This movie is great at explaining the evolution of hacktivism. People don't hack in the networked world for fun, they hack for political purpose, its almost as if it is a religion. There are many other movies about hacking and hacktivism. The movie Swordfish with John Travolta has to do with hacking, and so does the movie Hackers which came out in the 1980's. However, both of these movies do not deal with hacking as a political movement or in the form of Hacktivism, where as this documentary/film (We are Legion) does.

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2177843/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn9-80ObGA8

Anonymous - A Brief Overview

Today I am going to be talking about one of the major players within the hacktivism world: Anonymous.

History
Anonymous was established in 2003 to represent the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing. The term is considered to be a blanket term for members of a certain Internet subculture where people interact within an online environment but their actual identities are not known. The group has claimed responsibility for thousands of incredibly notable online attacks which will be described in more detail below. The group can be easily identified however by their use of the Guy Fawkes masks to mask their identity but maintain a consistent image when out in public.

Their official logo

A Guy Fawkes mask used to hide members identity

Purpose
Anonymous was first established as an online community wishing to work towards a goal and primarily focused on mere entertainment. However, beginning in the 2008, the group had become increasingly more associated with collaborative hacktivism. The group began to undertake a variety of protests in retaliation against anti-digital campaigns.

Membership
Anonymous members wishing to join can simply join the movement. No membership is required as there is no formal leader, hierarchy or headquarters. All member activity is conducted through a variety of online medias. Anonymous membership spreads all over the world with members being loosely identified in over 100 countries!

A group of Anonymous members protesting in Germany

Notable Attacks

2009 Iranian election protests
In 2009 during the Iranian presidential election, the Iranian government was accused of vote rigging once the results were announced. Anonymous, along with an Iranian site launched the Iranian Green Movement which allowed for an online forum for locals to display their displeasure. As a result, over 22,000 supporters worldwide showed their displeasure.

Operation Malaysia
On June 15, 2011, the group launched an attack on 91 website of the Malaysian government in response to the blocking of websites such as The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks within the country. The group changed all 91 websites to display information on censorship of basic human rights information

Future
It is quite clear that Anonymous has set up 'shop' and is here to stay. Government agencies must now learn how to co-exist with this hacktivism group so that more confident information is not leaked onto the internet for the world to see.

--Matthew Dicker

Hacktivism vs. Sony

Not to long ago now, Sony's Playstation network (PSN) got hacked. Nobody really knows what happened, how much got stolen, or what got stolen for that matter. All that Sony knows is that a lot of people's personal data has been breached. The fact that they did not know whether credit card numbers have been exposed is not very promising. Many of the major "Hacktivist" groups have denied taking part in this breach, including the infamous Anonymous hacktivist group.

The following video explains the story in more detail. 

The big question is, was this a attack of Hacktivism? Was it the Anonymous group trying to take down a big network, or trying to prove themselves? Or was this just a case of internet theft and cyber hacking to obtain credit card information. Either way, it wasn't necessary and caused lots of issues for Sony. 

So many webpages get defaced by hacktivism each day, governments and companies can both be victims, and in this case it is hard to say exactly what happened other than that over 77 million game users were affected by this breach. This breach affects Sony still to this date, people simply do not want to buy stuff off the playstation store, or register their credit card. Some people have even switched to Xbox because they feel safer. 

- Dan Rankin

Forms of Hacktivism

When many people think of the world hacktivism, they may think of the word hacking. Hacking refers to illegally breaking into a person(s) computer. Although they are similar words, hacktivism differs from hacking. Hacktivism refers to the legal or illegal use of computers and networks as a means of political protest. It is important to note that hacktivism can be a perfectly legal action, like writing on a Facebook page, whereas hacking somebody's computer or network is very illegal.

There are many different forms of hacktivism that a person can engage in. I will demonstrate a few different forms with examples found on the web.

1) Defacing a web page

Here you can see that the website for current Security of Defence for the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon has been defaced. Although difficult to see in this image, the right side of the website, where the quote is, has been changed to reflect a political groups views rather than Moons.

2) Email bombing

In this example, we can see that the hacktivists have send numerous emails to the same account to annoy the recipient of the emails. Normally, the emails will contain links to websites that the hacktivists support. 

3) Web sit-ins

In this final example of a form of hacktivism, hacktivists attempt to send ample amount of traffic to one website to that their servers are so overwhelmed that they have no choice than to shut down. This tactic is often used against a website that has made a controversial political statement that the hacktivists disagree with. 

In conclusion, there are many forms of hacktivism that hacktivists use to disrupt a political event, party or action. As everyday computer users, it is important that we are aware of these forms so that we do not jeopardize the security of our own personal computers.

Matthew Dicker

Saudi Aramco Gets Cyber Attacked

         On August 15th an unknown hacking group launched a cyber attack on Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world. The attack was in malware form and was intended to spy on the computers within the organization and alter some critical files. The attack ended up affected over 30,000 workstation and erased their hard drives, forcing them to go offline to prevent any further spreed of the virus. In addition some servers and services went offline to prevent and information leakage. It also effected the main website by making it go offline right away after the attack. Recently, Aramco official announced that after around 2 weeks of workstations cleansing  Saudi Aramco is finally fully cleansed from the malware. After this attack the company increased their firewall security and their internal policies regrading connecting external devices to the network to avoid any further attack.

Diaa Rafiq 




Sources used :
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/among-digital-crumbs-from-saudi-aramco-cyberattack-image-of-burning-u-s-flag/
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFL5E8JQ6PV20120826?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/08/28/oil-giant-saudi-aramco-recovers-from-cyber-attack/
http://www.fastcompany.com/3001119/mole-responsible-saudi-aramco-cyberattack