http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/hacktivists-beat-cybercriminals/
So, it turns out that in 2011, hacktivists have overtaken cybercriminals in terms of the amount of data collected. According to the Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, over 100 million (out of 174 million) stolen records were stolen by hacktivist groups in 2011. Is this a good thing?
This is a completely subjective issue, and depends on people's subjective opinions of the political and social agendas of these hacktivist groups. On one hand, these groups often point out gaping security holes, which then get patched, but on the other hand, some these groups are at best annoying and at worst destructive.
Obviously, the hacktivist group with the most name recognition is Anonymous. Surprisingly, this article doesn't mention Anonymous at all. This could be because Anonymous relies largely on denial-of-service attacks, rather than attacks that require more technical computer knowledge. The article does mention that the reason that the amount of data that hacktivists may have collected so much more data than cybercriminals is because hacktivists often target large organizations or government agencies (usually to further the political agenda of the hacktivist group), while cybercriminals are more likely to attack smaller businesses that have weak security systems.
So how do we judge this information? After reading the article, I'm not convinced as to who is worse. On one hand, cybercriminals clearly do more damage to individuals, especially business owners and employees. However, hacktivist groups could pose a larger-scale threat, due to their ability to disrupt larger agencies. It makes one think... where do we draw the line between hacktivism and cybercrime?
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