In today’s age, it seems as though we are always fighting a battle, on all fronts. We have physical warfare with bombs, guns and fighting with everything that we see on the news that is happening in Syria. Then we have a different kind of warfare that is happening right beneath us. Ok, not underground, but it may as well be.
This battle takes place in the cyber world with hacktivists.
In 2011, Sony was the target of Hacktivist group; Anonymous after the company filed legal action against George Hotz. Legal action was filed against Holtz because he released an encryption key and software tools onto his website which allowed PlayStation users to completely control their console.
Holz simply used the information he had and shared it with the world with the intention to make PlayStation an open source allowing users to alter the console individually–much like the open source operating system of Android.
However, after the law suit was filed, Anonymous decided to protest and coordinate denial of service attacks as they supported the notion that “information needs to be free.”
In these attacks, Anonymous dropped a ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’ software to flood Sony’s internet traffic and force them to go offline.
Once they were offline, 77 million users’ names, user names, addresses, email addresses, birth dates, and passwords were stolen.
Even though the law suit was settled just before the data was stolen, they wanted to make a point. Soon after, they released this video:
While they are activists for the people and stand up for our right to use information and technology how it is suppose to be used, and how it should be used–to its fullest and open potential. It also impacted the lives of gamers by shutting down the site and stealing the information of users. If they stole the information themselves, or if taking down the site allowed for another party to come in and steal the data, we don’t know. But there will always be a positive and negative impact on the world at the hands of activism, the same goes with was on the battlefield.
Monique Lombardo 
I find it fascinating that whilst so much hacktivism occurs underground, as you suggested, yet it has such strong physical consequences for large portions of society. This source, to build on your argument, explores why faceless hacktivism is so much more effective than physical protests and rallies. (http://lifehacker.com/5672997/the-benefits-of-disobedience-why-we-hack).
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I never really knew much about the Sony hacks and what they were about until reading your post. I appreciated that you related this week;s topic to a specific example, which really made the topic a lot easier for me to understand. The leaking of personal details is very scary for many people, who thought they could trust these websites. A similar thing happened to the personal details of Yahoo users, which can have significant repercussions for the company’s success due to customers’ trust as well as impacting potential partnerships with other companies, as this article explains- https://www.wired.com/2016/09/hack-brief-yahoo-looks-set-confirm-big-old-data-breach/
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Interesting read! I had actually never heard of the Sony hacks either. I like the way you compared hacktivism to the battlefield, do you think hacktivism really has the same impacts as a warzone?
🙂
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iv been seeing alot move hacktivism go down recently, new hacker/groups are targeting big servers and taking them offline for their own gains. Just look at PebbleCorp, they took down server gaming servers like Pokemon Go because they felt like it. If anything it just goes to show how vulnerable these servers are if attacks can be made this easily. just imagine what they could do if they took down a government site.
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I mean PoodleCorp not PebbleCorP* idk why i was thinking pebble
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Super informative on the Sony case. I wasn’t aware of this example, so thankyou. It is crazy to think that 77million people were affected by this case alone. Imagine how many people are being hacked right now!
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