Hacktivists Have the Upper Hand in an Environment Where Most Attacks Go Unreported

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Anonymous’ attack on UK government sites in protest of efforts to extradite WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to Sweden mirror the continued trend of dogmatically driven cyber attacks.
• Troubling statistics point to real reticence on the part of the attacked organizations to prosecute breaches, with DDoS vendor Arbor Networks publishing figures which reveal that just 26% of all distributed denial of service attacks are actually reported.

The summer of 2012 has been a season of ‘hacktivist’ discontent.  A spate of recent politically motivated cyber attacks against governments, including Mexico and the United Kingdom, underscore the fact that profit is no longer the primary driver for IT-related breaches.  A number of breach investigation reports from the last two years highlight the rising tide of hacktivist-sponsored attacks (see: ‘Hacktivism’ Changes the Threat Landscape, Again, February 10, 2012), a trend which clearly continues as hackers employ even more sophisticated application-layer tactics to attack the organizations they oppose on political, legal, or philosophical grounds.