Wardlow 1 Cassie Wardlow CST 300L December 4, 2012 Remember, Remember the 5th of November Hackers have been around for many centuries. It wasn’t until recently that they started to have a huge impact on society. Of course what they do has changed over the years, but they still all have the same idea. They don’t agree with government and they make sure their opinion is heard. Before the digital age, hackers weren’t really seen as a threat. Now that they can get into highly protected systems, the government is starting to worry. The history of how hackers came about is an interesting, especially how they have formed large groups today, like the famous Anonymous. Big important businesses and corporations may not enjoy hackers, but they are good for society. Hackers want the public to know that certain business are doing something wrong. Hacktivism is described as “the nonviolent use of legal and/or illegal digital tools in pursuit of political ends” (Skelton, 2012). In October of 1989, the first ever hack was done by a group called W.A.N.K. The stance of W.A.N.K was to bring awareness against the nuclear armament. They hacked into government computers, including NASA, and used a worm to change to login screens. This is what appeared on their screens: Image 1 Wardlow 2 Hackers were still around before computers but just doing things a little bit differently. In the 1600s, Guy Fawkes was in protest against religious intolerance. Guy Fawkes and a group of provincial English Catholics planned to assassinate King James I of England and VI of Scotland. They planned to do this by blowing up the House of Lords. He was discovered before he could execute his plan and was found with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. This all occurred on November 5, 1605. However, the word “hack” didn’t come around until September of 1946. Students at MIT created a club called The Tech Model Railroad Club and they mostly did pranks “imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity” (Levy). Since the computer wasn’t around yet, people were hacking into the phone systems to get free long distant calling. In Berlin, Germany, 1981 there was a group called Chaos Computer Club and they believed that the government should operate transparently and that information should be free. The CCC is one of the world’s biggest hacker organizations. Cult of the Dead Cow was formed in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas. This group wanted to achieve “global domination through media saturation” (Luminant Films, 2012) and later declared “war” on the Church of Scientology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed in July of 1990. Its members include lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists. They said they are first in the line of defense “when our freedoms in the networked world comes under attack” (Luminant Films, 2012). The term hacktivism was coined by a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow in 1996 and is defined as “the use of hacking as a form of political protest, subverting government surveillance of repressive regimes and the ideal that access to information is a basic human right” (Luminant Wardlow 3 Films, 2012). The Strano Network executed one of the earliest hacktivist protests. They shut down various French government websites for a one hour Net’Strike because of their opposition of the country’s nuclear and social policies. A Portuguese hacktivist group UrBaN KaOs attacked thirty Indonesian government website in protest to the oppression of East Timor. Today, the popular group named Anonymous is doing hacktivist protests around the world. These protests include going against the Church of Scientology, PayPal, and Australia for trying to censor the internet. They also shut down the Egyptian government website in support of the Arab Spring protests. Anonymous is constantly shutting down government and company websites if they do something the group doesn’t agree with. Along with shutting down websites, they steal personal information such as passwords and email addresses. There are three types of hackers, which include: white hat, grey hat and black hat. White hat hackers are considered the good guys in the hacker world. They hack into a computer system or network and to identify a security weakness. Instead of taking advantage of this, the let the system’s owner know about the weakness so they can fix it before it will be taken advantage of by a black hat hacker. Many white hat hackers work for companies to secure their computer systems (Rouse, 2007). Grey hat hackers are very similar to the white hat hackers. The grey hat finds a security weakness in a computer system, but doesn’t bring the attention to the owners. The goal is to improve the security but they publicize the information. Therefore, they make it a target for other hackers (Rouse, 2007). Lastly, the black hat hackers are the bad guys. Black hats break into a computer system with malicious intent. Their motives are to take advantage of the low security and destroy files or steal data for future purpose. It is possible that they will Wardlow 4 leak the information to the public so other hackers can exploit the system before it can be secured (Rouse, 2007). There are seven different types of hacking that hacktivist could use to carry out their plans. Many of these are readily available on the internet. The first form is defacing a web page. Between 1995 and 1999, approximately 5,000 websites were defaced. This means that a hacktivist will make significant changes to the front page of the company’s, or government’s, website (UV, 2011). The next form is called a web sit-in where hackers send so much traffic to the site that is gets overwhelmed and makes the site crash, therefore making it inaccessible to other users (UV, 2011). Another type of hacktivism is email bombing. This is where hacktivists send a large amount of emails with large file attachments to someone’s email address. Code and coding can be tools of hacktivism as well. Code can be used to obtain outside software and websites to achieve political purpose (UV, 2011). One example would be WikiLeaks. Website mirroring is used as a tool to bypass censorship blocks on a website. It copies content from a censored website and posts it to other sites without censors (UV, 2011). Geo-bombing is where a geo-tag is attached to a YouTube video so the location can be displayed on Google Earth (UV, 2011). Anonymous blogging is the last form of hacking. It is a method used to speak out about human rights issues and government oppression. They uses many web tools to remain anonymous such as, free email accounts, IP masking and blogging software (UV, 2011). There are many issues surrounding hacktivism today. The hackers themselves don’t think they are a threat to anyone and are just trying to get a point across. On the other hand, the government is starting to label them as terrorist and criminals. The real question is should they be considered a threat or a harmless computer hacker? To answer this question we need to ask Wardlow 5 how far these hacktivist are willing to take their hacking. One professor, from the University of Buffalo, says that they don’t create big threats and are mostly a nuisance. They start to become a threat when they attack the nation’s infrastructure (Hsu, 2011). There have been some attacks to cybersecurity on the Pentagon where the hackers stole critical and sensitive information (Hsu, 2011). Many government officials are against hacktivists because “today you generally don’t even know that you’ve been infected, which buys more time for criminals to use hijacked machines” (Clemmitt, 2011). Hacking is definitely on the rise as well. In 2010, Spain based Panda Security founded 59 million varieties of malware, which is up from 38 million in 2009 (Clemmitt, 20122). There is a difference between cybercriminals and hacktivists though. Hacktivists want to be heard and want to show the company that they can’t get away with wrong doings. Cybercriminals, on the other hand, are very sneaky and don’t like to be known about. They do things that beyond defacing a website for public interest. Chenxi Wang said, “...the weapon is much more accessible, the technology is more sophisticated. Everything is online - your life, my life - which makes it much more lethal” (Sengupta, 2012). The government needs to focus more on the real problem, cybercriminals not the hacktivists. In the past when people disagreed with something they tried to protest it. Today, Hacktivists are the modern protestor. They are utilizing technology and the internet to get their point across, instead of marching outside of company buildings with signs and chants. Today, hacktivists attack the websites so the company knows they mean business. One hacktivist says, “The internet is not some playground that corporations and governments can take basic civil liberties with and destroy them and get away with it” (Cox, 2012). A big part of hacktivism is to make a company loose profit from their website being down or defaced. Hopefully, that will Wardlow 6 make the company open their eyes and realize whatever they were doing was wrong. Another hacktivist says, “I’m not under the illusion that we’re going to change the world, but if we can make a big enough noise for people to notice there’s a problem and scream loud enough, someone’s going to take notice” (Cox, 2012). Hacktivists are just trying to prove a point and help those in need.