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IP: Wired News - The Golden Age of Hacktivism
From: [email protected]
Subject: IP: Wired News - The Golden Age of Hacktivism
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 21:56:06 EDT
To: [email protected]
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15129.html
The Golden Age of Hacktivism
by Niall McKay
4:00 a.m. 22.Sep.98.PDT
On the eve of Sweden's general election,
Internet saboteurs targeted the Web site
of that country's right-wing Moderates
political party, defacing pages and
establishing links to the homepages of the
left-wing party and a pornography site.
But the Scandanavian crack Saturday
was not the work of bored juveniles
armed with a Unix account, a slice of
easily compiled code, and a few hours to
kill. It advanced a specific political
agenda.
"The future of activism is on the
Internet," said Stanton McCandlish,
program director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. "More and more, what is
considered an offline issue, such as
protesting the treatment of the
Zapatistas in Mexico, is being protested
on the Net."
In the computer-security community, it's
called "hacktivism," a kind of electronic
civil disobedience in which activists take
direct action by breaking into or
protesting with government or corporate
computer systems. It's a kind of low-level
information warfare, and it's on the rise.
Last week, for example, a group of
hackers called X-pilot rewrote the home
page of a Mexican government site to
protest what they said were instances of
government corruption and censorship.
The group, which did not reply to several
emails, made the claims to the Hacker
News Network. The hacktivists were
bringing an offline issue into the online
world, McClandish said.
The phenomenon is becoming common
enough that next month, the longtime
computer-security group, the Cult of the
Dead Cow will launch the resource site
hacktivism.org. The site will host online
workshops, demonstrations, and software
tools for digital activists.
"We want to provide resources to
empower people who want to take part in
activism on the Internet," said Oxblood
Ruffian, a former United Nations
consultant who belongs to the Cult of the
Dead Cow.
Oxblood Ruffian's group is no newcomer
to hacktivism. They have been working
with the Hong Kong Blondes, a
near-mythical group of Chinese dissidents
that have been infiltrating police and
security networks in China in an effort to
forewarn political targets of imminent
arrests.
In a recent Wired News article, a member
of the group said it would target the
networks and Web sites of US companies
doing business with China.
Other recent hacktivist actions include a
wave of attacks in August that drew
attention to alleged human rights abuses
in Indonesia. In June, attacks on
computer systems in India's atomic
energy research lab protested that
country's nuclear bomb tests.
More recently, on Mexican Independence
Day, a US-based group called Electronic
Disturbance Theater targeted the Web
site of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.
The action was intended to protest
Zedillo's alleged mistreatment of the
Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. Nearly 8,000
people participated in the digital sit-in,
which attempted to overwhelm the
Mexican president's Web servers.
"What we are trying to do is to find a
place where the public can register their
dissatisfaction in cyberspace, so that
your everyday [mouse] clicker can
participate in a public protest," said EDT
co-founder Ricardo.
The apparent increase in hacktivism may
be due in part to the growing importance
of the Internet as a means of
communication. As more people go online,
Web sites become high-profile targets.
It also demonstrates that many
government sites are fairly easy to crack,
said one former member of Milw0rm, the
now defunct group that defaced the
Indian research lab's Web site. In an
interview in Internet Relay Chat, the
cracker rattled off a list of vulnerable US
government Web sites -- including one
hosting an electron particle accelerator
and another of a US politician -- and their
susceptibility to bugs.
"They don't pay enough for computer
people," said the cracker, who goes by
the name t3k-9. "You get $50,000 for a
$150,000 job."
Some security experts also believe that
there is a new generation of crackers
emerging. "The rise in political cracking in
the past couple of years is because we
now have the first generation of kids that
have grown up with the Net," John
Vranesevich, founder of the computer
security Web site AntiOnline. "The first
generation of the kids that grew up
hacking are now between 25 and 35 -�
often the most politically active years in
peoples' lives."
"When the Cult of the Dead Cow was
started in 1984, the average age [of our
members] was 14, and they spent their
time hacking soda machines," said
Oxblood Ruffian. "But the last couple of
years has marked a turning point for us.
Our members are older, politicized, and
extremely technically proficient."
While hacktivists are lining up along one
border, police and law enforcement
officials are lining up along another.
This year the FBI will establish a cyber
warfare center called the National
Infrastructure Protection Center. The
US$64 million organization will replace the
Computer Investigations and
Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center
and involve the intelligence community
and the military.
Allan Paller, director of research for the
SANS Institute, said the FBI is staffing
the new facility with the government's
top security experts. "They are stealing
people from good places, including a
woman from the Department of Energy
who was particularly good," he said in a
recent interview. "They are taking brilliant
people."
Paller also said that a grassroots effort is
under way in Washington to establish a
National Intrusion Center, modeled after
the Centers for Disease Control.
"There is definitely an increased threat of
cyber terrorism," said Stephen Berry,
spokesman for the FBI press office in
Washington.
As offline protests -- which are protected
in the United States by the constitution
-- enter the next digital age, the
question remains: How will the FBI draw
the distinction between relatively benign
online political protests and cyber
terrorism?
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