Hacktivism
Hacktivist is when they use computers or computer networks to promote political end. There
are a lot of Hacktivist organizations out there in the world. One famous
organization is anonymous. Anonymous is a group that hack networks, they
especially aim towards the government. They aim for the government because they
are hiding things from their citizens and they want the citizens to know what’s
going on. When it comes to releasing personal information on the internet they
think that if a person has done something wrong then they will release personal
information about the person but, they wouldn’t release personal information
about someone who is innocent. When it comes to the government, they will
release their information because they have lied to people and killed innocent
people. They think that people should be free to protest, publish and should be
free to speak out. There’s an application called LOIC that you can download and
take part in distributed denial of service attacks you can do that even if you
don’t know how to hack. If you have LOIC running it can flood any server with
garbage requests to access the website and users cannot get through. After that
the site won’t work, that is called denial of service. LOIC has a new feature
called hive mind mode. The new feature turns the computer into a robot, and it
allows a machine called BOT herder to take control of all the computers that
are running LOIC and can plan the attack. This is called ddosing. Some people
think that it’s wrong and some people think its right. By doing or
participating in ddosing you can face severe consequences like time in jail.
People plan attacks by convincing a lot of people to go to a certain page in a
certain day and point it at a certain page. One example of ddosing is when
anonymous hacked Sony’s play station network. People that had a play station
account couldn’t accesses their account because Sony’s play station network was
down. There was no explanation when the network went down. It stayed down for
like three to four weeks. While the network was down Sony sent mails to all
their users saying that their information might be compromised and it might be
taken by the hackers. When anonymous hacked Sony no one claimed credit for the
hack, Sony said that some users credit card information was taken. The credit
card information was never released to the public and who knows what they did
with it. Before the network was down anonymous did a blog saying that they
didn’t want to affect their users but when they hacked Sony’s play station
network, anonymous destroyed Sony’s play station network users. Even though
anonymous doesn’t do anything for their personal benefit, people’s data was
compromised. By anonymous hacking Sony they just made their security stronger.
There are different kinds of hackers. There are hackers who do it because they
are curious, some do it just because they can. Some hackers just go in and get
the information they want or need and then they get out. During the 1980’s in East
Germany if you owned a typewriter you had to register it with the government.
It was done so that the government could track a paper. In the west they
couldn’t believe how they could do that. Today if you buy a laser printer and
print out a something the paper it will have dots that make the printer unique.
This is one of the ways our government are using technology against us. There
are three main groups, one are online criminals. Online criminals use online
attacks to get money. Another group of groups are motivated by protest like the
group anonymous. The last group is the government who attack their own
citizens. In my opinion it depends what hacktivist organization do. For example, if
they release personal information about innocent people who haven’t done
anything wrong, that doesn’t seem right but if they release information about
someone who has done something wrong, then I think that’s fair. Like anonymous
does they release information about the government because they think that what
they are doing is wrong. It all depends on what the hacker does, what does he
or she takes and what he or she releases.
Hernandez's Blog 