Hacktivism - Notable Hacktivist Events

Notable Hacktivist Events

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• The earliest known instance of hacktivism as documented by Julian Assange is as follows:

  Hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when DOE, HEPNET and SPAN (NASA) connected VMS machines world wide were penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm. WANK penetrated machines had their login screens altered to:

W O R M S A G A I N S T N U C L E A R K I L L E R S _______________________________________________________________ \__ ____________ _____ ________ ____ ____ __ _____/ \ \ \ /\ / / / /\ \ | \ \ | | | | / / / \ \ \ / \ / / / /__\ \ | |\ \ | | | |/ / / \ \ \/ /\ \/ / / ______ \ | | \ \| | | |\ \ / \_\ /__\ /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/ \___________________________________________________/ \ / \ Your System Has Been Officially WANKed / \_____________________________________________/ You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.

• The first public use of DDoS as a form of protest was the Intervasion of the UK orchestrated by a group called the Zippies on Guy Fawkes Day, 1994.
• One of the earliest documented hacktivist events was the "Strano Network sit-in", defined "Netstrike", a strike action directed against French government computers in 1995.
• The term itself was coined by techno-culture writer Jason Sack in a piece about media artist Shu Lea Cheang published in InfoNation in 1995.
• On the night of Monday, 30 June 1997, at 4:30am the Portuguese hacking group UrBaN Ka0s hacked the site of the Republic of Indonesia and 25 other military and government sites as part of the hacking community campaign against the Indonesian government and the state of affairs in East Timor. This was one of the first mass hacks and the biggest in history.
• The hacking group milw0rm hacked into the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1998, replacing the center's website with an anti-nuclear message; the same message reappeared later that year in what was then an unprecedented mass hack by milw0rm of over 300 websites on the server of hosting company Easyspace.
• In 1998, the Electronic Disturbance Theater conducted "virtual sit-ins" on the Web sites of the Pentagon and the Mexican government to bring the world's attention to the plight of indigenous rights in the Mexican state of Chiapas. A Mexican hacking group took over Mexico's finance department website in support of the same cause.
• Another one of the more notorious examples of hacktivism, and the continuation of the 1997 attacks, was the modification of more Indonesian web sites with appeals to "Free East Timor" in 1998 by Portuguese hackers.
• On December 29, 1998, the Legions of the Underground (LoU) declared cyberwar on Iraq and China with the intention of disrupting and disabling internet infrastructure. On January 7, 1999, an international coalition of hackers (including Cult of the Dead Cow, 2600's staff, Phrack's staff, L0pht, and the Chaos Computer Club) issued a joint statement condemning the LoU's declaration of war. The LoU responded by withdrawing its declaration.
• Hacktivists attempted to disrupt ECHELON (an international electronic communications surveillance network filtering any and all satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic traffic) by holding "Jam Echelon Day" (JED) on October 21, 1999. On the day, hacktivists attached large keyword lists to many messages, taking advantage of listservers and newsgroups to spread their keywords further. The idea was to give the Echelon computers so many "hits" they overloaded. It is not known whether JED was successful in actually jamming Echelon, although NSA computers were reported to have crashed "inexplicably" in early March, 2000. A second Jam Echelon Day (JEDII) was held in October 2000, however the idea never regained its initial popularity. JED was partly denial-of-service attack and partly agitprop.
• The Federation of Random Action calls for a virtual sit-in on Occidental Petroleum in support of the U’wa’s protest against drilling on indigenous land during 2001.
• The Electronic Disturbance Theater and others staged a week of disruption during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, conducting sit-ins against Republican web sites and flooding web sites and communication systems identified with conservative causes. This received mixed reviews from the hacktivist community.
• The Hackbloc collective started publishing Hack This Zine, a hacktivist research journal
• Hacktivists worked to slow, block, or reroute traffic for web servers associated with the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank.
• Throughout 2006, Electronic Disturbance Theater joined the borderlands Hacklab for a number of virtual sit-ins, against the massacre in Atenco, in solidarity with striking French students and against the Minutemen and immigration laws.
• On March 25, 2007, hacktivists organized the event freEtech in response to the O'Reilly Etech conference, and started a series of West coast hackmeetings.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater stages a virtual sit-in against the Michigan Legislature against cuts to Medicaid.
• On January 21, 2008, a message appeared on YouTube from a group calling itself 'Anonymous'. The group declared "Project Chanology", essentially a war on The Church of Scientology, and promised to systematically expel The Church from the internet. Over the following week, Scientology websites were intermittently knocked offline, and the Church of Scientology moved its website to a host that specializes in protection from denial-of-service attacks.
• A computer hacker leaks the personal data of 6 million Chileans (including ID card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and academic records) from government and military servers to the internet, to protest Chile's poor data protection.
• Throughout early 2008, Chinese hackers have hacked the CNN website on numerous occasions in response to the protests during the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay and claims of biased reporting from western media. The majority of the DDoS attacks took place between March and August, at a time where Chinese nationalistic pride was at an all time high due to the 2008 Olympic Games.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Hacklab stage a virtual sit-in against the war on Iraq and biotech and nanotech war profiteers, on the 5 year anniversary of the war, in solidarity with widespread street actions.
• Intruders hacked the website of commentator Bill O'Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers, in retaliation for remarks O'Reilly made on Fox News condemning the attack on Palin's Yahoo email account.
• In 2008 hacktivists developed a communications and monitoring system for the 2008 RNC protests called Tapatio.
• In early 2009, the Israeli invasion of Gaza motivated a number of website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, and domain name and account hijackings, from both sides. These attacks are notable in being amongst the first ever politically motivated domain name hijackings.
• During the 2009 Iranian election protests, Anonymous played a role in disseminating information to and from Iran by setting up the website Anonymous Iran; they also released a video manifesto to the Iranian government.
• On August 1, 2009, the Melbourne International Film Festival was forced to shut down its website after DDoS attacks by Chinese vigilantes, in response to Rebiya Kadeer's planned guest appearance, the screening of a film about her which is deemed "anti-China" by Chinese state media, and strong sentiments following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots. The hackers booked out all film sessions on its website, and replaced festival information with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans.
• August 24, 2009, New Hacktivism: From Electronic Civil Disobedience to Mixed Reality Performance workshop at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics led by Micha Cárdenas in Bogotá, Colombia.
• In November 2009, computers of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University were hacked, and email purporting to expose a conspiracy by scientists to suppress data that contradicted their conclusions regarding global warming was made available on a Russian FTP server.
• On February 10, 2010, Anonymous DDoS-attacked Australian government websites against the Australian governments attempt to filter the Internet.
• On July 23, 2010, European Climate Exchange's website was targeted by hacktivists operating under the name of decocidio#ϴ. The website showed a spoof homepage for around 22 hours in an effort to promote the contention that carbon trading is a false solution to the climate crisis.
• On December 8, 2010, the websites of both Mastercard and Visa were the subject of an attack by hacktivist group Anonymous, reacting to the two companies' decision to stop processing payments to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, following a series of leaks by the site. Mastercard said the attack had no impact on people's ability to use their cards, though there were claims by an unnamed payment firm that their customers had experience a complete loss of service. Anonymous was later blamed for the DDoS attacks on om.nl and politie.nl (Dutch government websites).
• In January 2011, the websites of the government of Zimbabwe were targeted by anonymous due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents.
• In January 2011, Anonymous launches DDOS attacks against the Tunisian government websites due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents and the 2010–2011 Tunisian protests. Tunisians were reported to be assisting in these denial-of-service attacks launched by Anonymous. Anonymous released an online message denouncing the government clampdown on recent protests. Anonymous has named their attacks as "Operation Tunisia". Anonymous successfully ddossed eight Tunisian government websites. They planned attacks on Internet Relay Chat networks. An unknown user subsequently attacked Anonymous's website with a ddos on January 5.
• In January 2011, Anonymous, in response to the 2011 Egyptian protests, attacked Egyptian government websites and voiced support for the people of Egypt.
• Google worked with engineers from SayNow and Twitter to provide communications for the Egyptian people in response to the government sanctioned internet blackout during the 2011 protests. The result, Speak To Tweet, was a service in which voicemail left by phone was then tweeted via Twitter with a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow.
• During the Egyptian internet black out, Jan 28- Feb 2 of 2011, Telecomix provided dial up services, and technical support for the Egyptian people.
• On April 20, 2011, hackers took down Sony's PlayStation Network. Anonymous was suspected of hacking PSN for their previous threats to Sony for suing Geohotz, who jailbroke the PlayStation 3 but they later claimed that they didn't. Afterwards, a group of hackers claimed to have 2.2 million credit card numbers from PSN users for sale.
• In June 2011, LulzSec and Anonymous launched Operation AntiSec, an enormous hactivist operation that a large number of hackers and hacking organizations have taken part in. It has included breaches of many companies and government agencies.
• On November 5, 2011, a Fire Sale, made famous by the film Live Free or Die Hard, attempt was reportedly made but was an obvious failure but was still the first of its kind. A hacker called AnonymousPEF attempted this with a software acting virus.
• On January 20, 2012, the websites for Department of Justice and the FBI experienced difficulties after suffering a denial of service attack. The hackers group Anonymous claimed responsibility, in response to the shut down of the file sharing website Megaupload.