Chapter 7
Social Media and Digital Protest
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
—John Donne
Just as no man is an island, neither is information technology an island, at least not anymore. Today information technology is a tool for the many, and its success is dependent on increasingly wide acceptance and fully engaged use. Information technology today isn't just a computer. It is computer-driven, yes. But it is much more than the ability to calculate and communicate. It is a revolutionary vehicle that is rapidly changing not only the way society communicates but the way it relates. Social media is shaping culture, religion, politics, economics, diplomacy, terrorism, and war. The flash-fire escalation of social media is a phenomenon of the Internet age. It is the ultimate congruence of hardware, software, services, and communications, fueled by low-cost, low-profile, multiuse physical devices that are literally in the hands of the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly alike. These devices pervade the home, the office, even the industrial workplace, as well as schools and universities.
Social media enables mass messaging and unprecedented influence capabilities, often at the drop of a tweet. Social media today is the ultimate example that no man is an island. Social media has created a powerful demonstration that the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its many, many parts. It has given voice to causes honorable and dishonorable, good and bad, legal and illegal, formal and informal, powerful and negligible. The voice of social media is often the loudest voice.
Social media is the magic powder of the era. It casts an incredibly wide, sometimes illusory, and enticing net. It is an elixir capable of bringing under its spell those near and far. It is perceived by many as a personal form of communication, an extension of self. Social media, it seems, has an intoxicating effect. There are those who use it indiscriminately, disclosing information without thinking twice. It has neither ethics nor morality, but it reflects those who use it, a sort of Narcissus reflection in a pond. And that is its greatest power, and its greatest weakness. Being careless in social media communications has gone viral.
Following is an example of how social media was used by hackers to profile a large number of banks. It started because bank employees didn't realize the importance of using social media with extreme caution. Much like in the use of e-mail, familiarity breeds not contempt but trust, or even passivity. Despite many warnings to the contrary, the employees (in one case, thousands of them) failed to exercise caution when using social media.
When using social media applications, the employees, while they did use their work e-mail addresses, didn't use their bank passwords. The banks' passwords were sufficiently complex, but the employees created different, easier, less complex passwords for social media. The problem was that hackers lay in wait for them, a sort of digital ambush. The hackers knew the employees would show up at the social media sites. Because the passwords used for the social media sites were easy to break, they were broken.
By breaking the passwords, the hackers were able to obtain a lot of useful information from bank employees as they continuously built profiles of the employees. They acquired the full names of employees, bank names, work addresses, names of colleagues, titles, photographs, reporting structures, and other information. The employees were being profiled in depth. Their profiles were found after a defensive search of hacker databases to see if bank employees were in fact being profiled. They were. But why?
These profiles are exploitable. The more information contained in the profile, the better for the hacker. Social media social engineering is on the rise. In fact, having access to this kind of profile data is a gold mine for anyone engaging in social engineering. Skilled social media social engineers are able to insinuate themselves into most any environment given enough information to work with. Phishing is a type of Internet identity crime, and spear-phishing is a variant. Phishing is typically an electronic communication sent to someone's e-mail address in an attempt to fool the recipient into responding and disclosing personal, confidential information. Often, the communication sent to the unsuspecting individual appears to come from a bank or sometimes even the Internal Revenue Service. The criminal perpetrating the hoax wants to fool the recipient into sending personal data back to the criminal. Phishing attacks usually are sent to many unsuspecting victims whose e-mail addresses appear on various lists. Spear-phishing is a more targeted approach, often aimed at higher net-worth individuals or who share certain other attributes in common. Maybe they belong to an association or other group. According to the FBI, “criminals need some inside information on their targets to convince them the e-mails are legitimate. They often obtain it by hacking into an organization's computer network [which is what happened in the previous case] or sometimes by combing through other websites, blogs, and social networking sites.”
Phishing and spear-phishing attacks generate billions of dollars of revenue for criminal organizations and scam artists around the world. Bear in mind that the more information the dark side hackers have on employees in any company, the greater the risk of information compromise. That is why social media, used irresponsibly, elevates risk throughout the enterprise.
Anyone using a computer of any kind, from a desktop PC to a smartphone, knows that social media has become a dominant factor in the consumer as well as business marketplace. From selling real estate to marketing virtually every consumer product imaginable, social media is hot. It seems that most every company is engaged with social media. More than a decade ago, blogs, part of the social media experience, were becoming part of the landscape. They were a vehicle for ranting and venting, and companies were often the target. A company or product failed to meet expectations? Blog about it. A restaurant overcooked the steak? Blog about it and recount for everyone clicking onto the site about the quality of the food and service. The automobile manufacturer failed to stand by a warranty or the car broke down after a hundred miles? Blog about it—let everyone know.
Targeted companies railed about blogs, but blogging caught on. And now so has just about every other aspect of social media. Social media has gone mainstream. The Pew Research Center in 2003 estimated the universe of blogs to be some 4 million, growing to 8.8 million in 2004.1 The Technorati research organization at that time forecast that 10,000 new blogs were coming online every day.2 These numbers seems almost archaic, even quaint. Contrast those numbers with social media today. More than 1 billion mobile users visit Facebook every month.3 So it seems that social media is here to stay.
Social Media: A Tool for Disruption, a Model for Change
Social media is not all fun. It is a useful tool to those whose interests go beyond connecting professionally, sharing stories on everything from what's for dinner to birth and death announcements. It is also a very popular tool for professionals seeking to expand personal and professional horizons. There's very little that social media has not touched, including transnational organized crime and terrorist factions. And then there's the concept of social activism and social media. Think flash mobs.
Social media can bring large numbers of activists together, physically or technically. Both scenarios have happened. In the physical sense, social media can spread the word on where to go, when to be there, and what the cause of the day is going to be. People will assemble; people will protest. In the past, the World Trade Organization, the G-8, and the G-20 have been targeted. Protesters have been known to riot, pillage, plunder, shoot, and burn.
Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, civil upheaval has resulted in the overthrow of regimes, social unrest, military engagement, economic disruption, and many deaths of civilians and government representatives. The outcomes of what has become known as the Arab Spring, which erupted in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Western Sahara, Djibouti, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, and elsewhere, are undecided. What is not in doubt is that social media plays a key role in enabling the coordination, assembly, awareness, and perhaps even funding of the social and cultural unrest unsettling the status quo. Social media is what makes these unfolding events unique.
As noted in Chapter 3, the Al Qaeda–sympathetic magazine Inspire is dependent on social media to attract and recruit adherents and to raise funds for terrorist engagement. This is social media and digital media shaping culture. And just as social media is shaping culture, social media is being used to commit criminal actions.
The Hacker Group Anonymous
The hacker group Anonymous has embraced social media and has used it to further its antibusiness agenda. Based on what has been garnered about Anonymous, its members are anti–intellectual property and trade secrets, anti-assets, and anti-ownership. This group of secretive, sometimes invisible hackers with great skill and global reach has adopted social media as an arm of its attacker profile. The myth with which Anonymous defines itself is that it is on the right side of justice. Not the law, but justice. The reality is that it is a loosely defined group of cyber thugs who make their own rules and enforce their vision of social justice on the rest of the world. Anonymous seems to believe that its members are the Billy Jack of social justice and social media. Of course, this is a perversion of reality. There is nothing virtuous about Anonymous.
For the uninitiated, Billy Jack was a 1971 feature film that came out in the midst of the Vietnam War and the height of the counterculture in America. The film is the story of a half-Navajo American Indian and Vietnam Green Beret combat veteran. He becomes a vigilante in defending the hippie-esque Freedom School against the local townspeople, who are headed by a wealthy rancher-villain. The rancher-villain and his gang of thugs represent the status quo, the local power base. They are the establishment and they feel threatened by change. The Freedom School represents that change. Billy Jack is the defender of the school. He is a tough guy, played by the actor Tom Laughlin. Trained in martial arts, Billy Jack can kill with his hands and feet. He is the ultimate vigilante: virtuous and on the side of right.
The story line is this. One day, a busload of students, including Navajo from the Freedom School, arrive in town for ice cream. Billy Jack protects the children from abuse and harassment by the rancher-villain's son and his friend. A punch here, a kick there, and the bad guys are down and out for the count. But outside, the rancher-villain and his followers await Billy Jack. The rancher-villain arrives and squares off with Billy Jack. He is pompous, wealthy, seemingly in control of his universe. He's overweight, middle-aged. He rules his world, or so he thinks. Billy Jack is surrounded. The villain-rancher says with a condescending smirk to Billy Jack, “Big Indian chief, so special, so above the law. You think can do just as you please.”
Then, in one of the more poignant moments in the film, Billy Jack explains what is going to happen next. Realizing that there is no way out of his predicament, he says, “You know what I'm going to do…just for the hell of it. I'm going to take this right foot, and I'm going to whop you on that side of your face,” pointing to the right side of the villain-rancher's head. “And you know something—there's not a damn thing you're gonna be able to do about it.” Then the villain-rancher is down.
Anonymous believes it is the Billy Jack of the Internet and that there isn't much global law enforcement can do to stop it, despite the fact that Anonymous hackers were arrested in 2013 for attacks against a variety of targets, including organizations supportive of intellectual property ownership. There's one key difference, though, between Anonymous and the film character. The film character possesses the value of tolerance, a value unknown to Anonymous. Anonymous wants the world to reflect its vision of what is right, and falling outside that narrow definition subjects anyone to the scrutiny of Anonymous, and possibly targeting by the group.
Anonymous Is an “Anti” Outfit of Malcontents
Anonymous is anticopyright, anti–intellectual property, anti–trade secret, anti-anything it deems as inappropriate or unfair: Information is for sharing, not owning. This appears to be its credo. Anyone who wants information should be able to have free and unrestricted access to it. Anonymous is anti–villain rancher, antiestablishment. It is, in its own frame of reference, the freedom fighter of the Internet and the Web. Anonymous seems to think of itself as the Billy Jack of the virtual world. Of course, it isn't. The Anonymous vision of itself is an illusion. At its best, it is a nuisance, at its worst, a criminal enterprise. Unlike the fictional movie hero, members of Anonymous hide behind the secrecy and invisibility of the Internet. They are confrontational only to the extent that they believe that they are invincible and cannot be caught, but that assumption is proving to be incorrect as law enforcement continues to unravel the identities of Anonymous members.
Social media is clearly changing business, just as it has enabled Anonymous, taking it to a higher level of influence, action, and impact. It is changing how people socialize, communicate, even mingle, date, and marry. Some believe in the positive power of social media, while others believe it trivializes relationships and replaces relationship integrity with the shell of a relationship. Both camps are probably right. But the impact of social media is undeniable. The case for Anonymous is interesting in that, unlike the Arab Spring, traditional social protest designed to orchestrate assembly, the goal of this loosely held organization is to assemble online to conduct disruptive attacks against specified corporate targets. Anonymous taking on the rights associated with intellectual property is telling.
Anonymous is a loosely affiliated network of social activists and hackers. Some are very technically proficient. They understand the intricacies of hardware, software, information systems, information security, and how to defeat security and availability of information. The members of Anonymous, which dates back to 2003, are essentially hackers with a cause. They are both hackers and social activists and are fond of referring to themselves, as others also refer to them, as “hacktivists.” While Anonymous is, well, anonymous, many of its members are known to law enforcement around the world and many have been arrested. The law enforcement community has become much more technically sophisticated and has gained a great deal of experience in combating cyber crime, and it is increasingly difficult to be invisible on the Internet. Not that it can't be done, but it is increasingly difficult to hide behind the veil of anonymity.
Anonymous in the past has attacked a diverse range of targets, including the governments of the United States, Israel, Uganda, Tunisia, and other countries. It has attacked legitimate corporations, and supported the widely publicized Occupy movement, a social protest against economic and political inequality. It also supported WikiLeaks, which was involved in the leaking of classified security information supplied by U.S. Army private first class Bradley Manning. Yet Anonymous has also focused its considerable prowess on targeting child pornography sites. The group has its own code of social justice and is empowered by social media.
A scan of the Web shows that while Anonymous members may be cloaked in secrecy, its profile is not. The group has an international reputation. Some refer to Anonymous as freedom fighters. Others call them cyber terrorists. Whether digital Robin Hoods or cyber criminals, the organization has been breaking numerous U.S. domestic and international laws. The fundamental philosophy of Anonymous is at odds with most governments and industry, so it should come as no surprise that its members are coming under more scrutiny by law enforcement.
Although Anonymous was believed to have become relatively quiet by 2009, after its attack on film actor Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology, it reemerged. The group operates from bases in a number of countries, using computers and Internet connectivity that is difficult to associate with specific members. The FBI has described Anonymous as a loose affiliation of individuals with no defined leadership or membership. “In practice, the label Anonymous is the banner under which individuals or groups commit actions, including intrusions into computer systems.” Anonymous has made some strategic errors. One such error may have been to target law enforcement in its cyber attacks, which could be a powerful incentive for law enforcement in turn to target Anonymous.
In Reckless Move, Anonymous Targeted Law Enforcement
In 2012, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old man believed to be associated with Anonymous. According to the U.S. federal complaint, filed in the District of Utah, the defendant has links to a group associated with the hacker-activist network. The indictment alleges that the defendant hacked into protected computers without authorization on two occasions in January 2012 and intentionally caused damage to servers hosting web sites for two Utah law enforcement agencies. The first intrusion took place on January 19, 2012, and involved a server hosting a web site for the Utah Chiefs of Police Association. The second count alleges a similar attack on January 31, 2012, on the server hosting the Salt Lake City Police Department web site. FBI agents in the case traced the IP addresses used in the attacks to the defendant.
Anonymous has for many years been terrorizing companies and governments, including law enforcement. In 2013, Anonymous Indonesia is believed to have broken into more than 170 Australian web sites because these mostly small businesses and organizations had simply cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies, a no-no among the antiestablishment members of this hacker group. Ongoing investigations across multiple jurisdictions, and arrests and prosecutions of some of its members, have yielded information about Anonymous's identities. Whether acting independently as arbiters of what they believe to be right, or even selling their services to nation-states and other groups, members of the group are behind many cyber attacks and possess a great deal of influence.
The behaviors of members of Anonymous are as interesting as they are illegal. They often envision themselves as cyber superheroes fighting evil and injustice. But their superpowers are not derived from comic book fantasies. Their superpowers come from computer wizardry. While not all hackers have this level of sophistication, some do, and that's all that it takes to do damage. These are the leaders. This is where social media and social protest converge with the interests of Anonymous, and with others who use protest as a social voice of opposition.
Several trends have converged that have allowed Anonymous to lead and others to follow, creating a dangerous cyber weapon. The low cost of technology, the almost unimaginable growth of mobile devices around the world, omnipresent social media, continuous availability, and the variable degree of anonymity offered by the Internet have enabled a powerful form of protest and digital assembly.
The Web is a massive marketplace and a criminal's dream. In the case of Anonymous, the organization has confused criminal conduct with social protest. The Web has become a social rallying point, and Anonymous has taken advantage of the condition. The digital flash mob has been born, and Anonymous has used it in an attack on industry, not for any peaceable assembly.
Anonymous has used social media to conduct a form of cyber attack known as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). These are simply attacks that flood a particular Web address with so much traffic that the address becomes clogged to the point that it is unresponsive. It's New York City at rush hour, complicated by a massive parade and garbage and transit strikes, when every resident of Manhattan is trying to get to New Jersey to respond to an offer of free real estate. Everything stops. Nothing moves.
In a DDoS attack, many people and devices flood a specified Web address, causing that address to become dead in the water, so to speak. The trick is to get as many devices as possible on the offensive against the site. This is where social media and recruitment weigh in. This is the place where leaders come to inspire, recruit, and direct digital adherents.
This isn't the only DDoS attack strategy, but it is effective and works well—until it doesn't. This was the case in the late 2013 arrests of 13 members of Anonymous, all of whom were charged in a grand jury indictment by the Department of Justice in the Eastern District of Virginia. The federal indictment is payback for, well, Operation Payback, an online conspiracy between the 13 defendants and others in what the indictment describes as “coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victims.”
Anonymous members and their online participating sympathizers, as well as their coconspirators, believe that all information should be free. It's that simple. Free information for the asking—or the taking. It wouldn't matter who created the music, the movie, the literature, the news, the science, the technology, the invention, the concept. Everything should be free, available to anyone, anytime. According to the indictment, Anonymous, through Operation Payback, “targeted victims worldwide, including governmental entities, trade associations, individuals, law firms, and financial institutions.”
Anonymous: Making All Information Free for All
Those organizations became targets because Anonymous claimed that the institutions are opposed to the “stated philosophy of making all information free for all, including information protected by copyright law or national security considerations.” This is the opposite of what Anonymous believes.
Operation Payback hit a wide range of entities, but all the victims shared a connection: a connection to restricted information that had financial value. Anonymous tapped into a vein of common sentiment among its followers. Those followers believed, as Anonymous did, that information had value, and that no one had the right to own and benefit from that ownership. The victims of its attacks possessed no rights with respect to their own information or to charge fees for the use of the information. Some of the Anonymous victims were reasonably high-profile organizations, though not all were. Targeted organizations included the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard, and Bank of America.
Operation Payback had a life span of about a year, beginning on or about September 16, 2010. The indictment charges that Anonymous launched a “series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant Internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the website unavailable to customers and users of those websites.” The weapon of choice in this protracted cyber offensive was a free online testing tool known as Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), which is used legitimately to stress test computer networks. What Anonymous did was to publicize its pending attacks and recruit as many followers as it could, getting its politically charged adherents around the world to simultaneously fire LOIC tools at selected targets, rendering the victim web sites temporarily unavailable.
In its recruitment efforts, Anonymous made decisions about which targets to strike and then publicized the intended targets and their IP addresses. Anonymous then announced the dates, times, and any other required instructions needed to bring its followers in on the coordinated attacks. They communicated to their followers the attack tool of choice, LOIC, and continuously recruited for the events. They recruited using Web bulletin boards, social media sites, and dedicated online chat rooms known as Internet relay channels, or IRCs.
“We target the bastard group that has thus far led the charge against our websites, like the Pirate Bay,” Anonymous posted in an online message. “We target MPAA.ORG,” the group wrote about the Motion Picture Association of America, which was targeted in this case because of the Pirate Bay, the Anonymous-supported file-sharing web site based in Sweden that was dedicated to illegally downloading copyrighted information. MPAA shut down the Pirate Bay, infuriating Anonymous and prompting the retaliatory measure.
In an illustration of its reach and influence, Anonymous circulated an online flier that noted the MPAA IP address as it recruited its followers. Anonymous instructed, “The IP is designated at [deleted], and our firing time remains THE SAME.” Anonymous gave directions on how its followers should proceed. “Install the LOIC linked above into any directory you choose, load it up and set the target IP to [deleted] port 80 Method will be TCP, threads set to 10+, with a message of ‘Payback is a bitch…’ Everything else must be left blank. Once you have the target locked, DO NOT FIRE. REPEAT: DO NOT FIRE!” The electronic instruction continued, “This will be a calm, coordinated display of blood. We will not be merciful. We will not be newfags. The first wave will be firing in: ONE DAY: 09/17/2010 9pm EASTERN. When it comes time to fire, ignore all warning messages. They mean nothing. Keep firing.”
Anonymous was monitoring the MPAA attack progress as if it were following a military assault. One member of the group during the attack noticed that MPAA.org had moved to another IP address as a defense against the continuing attack. In a plea for more help from the attackers, the Anonymous member posted online the message, “Need thread guys! MPAA.org is back! they have a new IP…someone took notice.” Anonymous then stated that on the following day there would be an attack on the Recording Industry Association of America.
In Pursuit of the Anonymous Definition of Civil Liberties
A member of Anonymous recently said that the “guiding principles behind it are positive change, the restoration and preservation of liberty and freedom and individual rights.” This is a difficult position for Anonymous because it seems inconsistent. Do liberty, freedom, and individual rights, which it says it seeks to protect, allow creators of information to prosper from their efforts? Apparently not. Anonymous gets to name its principles but there is great inconsistency in its logic.
Fourteen other Anonymous members have been arrested in Ankara, Turkey, for commission of cyber crimes in numerous cities throughout that country. Their attacks were against government web sites.
The FBI has stated that Anonymous has been broken. Maybe, but that is not likely. Every time one Anonymous member is arrested, another moves in line to assume the vacated position. Anonymous has a big bench and there seems to be no shortage of those willing to fill its seats. But the FBI made a very good point: Anonymous members eventually slip up. They make a mistake, which enables law enforcement to make arrests. In the case of the 13 arrests in association with the attacks against MPAA and others, one of the Anonymous members participated in an attack from his home computer, which led the FBI to his home address. Simply put, he got lazy.
Anonymous and other groups like it are not on the way out. In fact, they are increasingly dangerous because of their access to increasingly powerful low-cost technology and to large numbers of followers through social media, which is growing rapidly. While it is true that law enforcement is making significant gains, groups like Anonymous are here to stay. Their members may change, their tactics may evolve over time given changes in technology, but these rogue hacker groups remain a significant threat to business and governments around the world. The actions of Anonymous that come directly from its members make it clear that it is a continuing threat. Failure to defend against attackers of this type will result in loss. Operational risk management and information security organizations must protect their environment and their intellectual property and other proprietary information.
Technology and anonymity have given a voice and a weapon to those who in previous generations have not had that voice and weapon. Anonymous and its members do not appear to be in it for the money. In part, that is what makes them dangerous. They are driven and inspired by ideology. They get to make their own rules and their own rules of engagement. For Anonymous, there is power in righteousness, and they believe they are right and righteous. While they may come from many backgrounds, they share in common a goal that is antithetical to the fundamental principles of business.
During the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, there were some American citizens, including those in the military and in the defense industry, who betrayed their country and worked for the Soviet Union. While some were traitors for money, many more were inspired by ideology. Those were the dangerous ones. Their principles, regardless how skewed and inconsistent with any logic, were the guiding light of their actions.
Anonymous members share this attribute, and that is what empowers them. It would be a monumental mistake to underestimate the range, influence, and impact of their actions. Social media has for Anonymous and groups like them created a vast network of followers, who may or may not agree with every tenet of the principles of Anonymous. But the careful targeting of specific victims, based on very specific principles, such as property ownership and other values adopted by much of the world, have enabled Anonymous to bring together a formidable attack strategy.
Anarchaos: In the Image of Anonymous
Another hacker group appearing in the headlines in 2013: Anarchaos, a portmanteau of “anarchists” and “chaos.” In May 2013 one of its members pleaded guilty to U.S. federal hacking charges. The hacker admitted to forcibly breaking into the computer systems of Stratfor, an intelligence company that has government and private-sector clients, in 2011. He also admitted to breaking into FBI training center computers. Breaking into systems belonging to law enforcement and companies working with law enforcement is something of a digital death wish. But it is also a signal of arrogance, one of the trademarks of professional hackers.
The judge in the Anarchaos case in U.S. district court in New York City didn't accept the hacker's defense. The defense? He said his actions represented “a new form of protest.” Good for the judge. There are a number of ways to protest using digital technology: Developing a web site dedicated to the advocacy of the cause, creating a blog or writing in someone else's blog, or expressing opinions on social media web sites around the world are all options. Twitter is often used for advocacy. It's lawful in the United States to assemble under most conditions, and it's lawful to coordinate and stimulate assembly using the Internet. This is all a legitimate form of protest. But hacking into another's computer system is not a legitimate form of protest. It is breaking and entering.
Suppose someone breaks into a house. The homeowner, the victim, holds an opinion antithetical to the intruder. The intruder plots and plans, coming up with a method to override the security of the locks securing doors and windows. It's the security system. Once inside, the intruder searches for documents outlining the target's positions, strategy, goals, and so on. He changes the documents, or maybe burns them. Regardless, the integrity of the home and possessions is now compromised. The intruder may destroy documents or maybe deface the walls by painting symbols on them, or maybe sinks and tubs are filled to capacity and then overflow, ruining floors, perhaps destabilizing the electrical system. Perhaps the intruder barricades himself inside the structure, not allowing anyone access, but invites certain people to come over and occupy the house with him. This is basically what some hackers do in the digital world. While most people would object to anyone controlling or accessing anyone's personal home or business without permission, because it happens in the virtual world there is not as much outrage. Hackers are sometimes given a pass by society. “They're expressing themselves,” some say in defense. “It's just the Internet.” “They're just kids.” “People have the right to speak their mind.”
Hackers often believe that their rights transcend the rights of others. Clearly that is the case with the members of Anonymous and Anarchaos. From the earliest age of computer use by the masses, certain individuals who possess computing skills for perhaps the first time in their lives feel a sense of empowerment. Perhaps they didn't feel that way in school. Maybe they had dead-end jobs. This was their path to another world, one in which they evolved in a way different from their more digitally challenged peers.
Some went on to work for the government, some joined the corporate workforce. Some moved to the dark side, where Anonymous lives. Are its members narcissists? Are they frustrated computer nerds who can, so they do? The motives of Anonymous are not as important as its actions. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Even facts are often fluid, based upon interpretation and perception. But the actions of Anonymous, and other groups similar to it, are outside the legal framework of most nations. It is also true that the use and manipulation of social media is going to increase, and much of the manipulation will be by groups such as Anonymous, other hacker groups, and also by terrorists seeking recruits, capital, internal messaging, and the ability to assemble on demand.
The ability to use social media to foment support for protests and boycotts against virtually any enterprise, government or industry, is increasingly an operational risk. It will also become an even more compelling and effective attack vector for Anonymous and those sympathetic to its cause as social media use and mobile device proliferation continue.