Hacktivists may be bigger threat to private firms than cybercriminals -study

Are "hacktivists" stealing more than actual criminals? A study of data breaches may suggest so.

 

A study of significant security incidents in 2011 indicated that hacktivists —hackers whose actions are politically motivated— stole more data from large corporations than cybercriminals, according to a report on BBC.

 

The BBC said the analysis by Verizon found a huge rise in politically motivated attacks, with 58 percent of the data stolen during breaches taken by such groups.

 

Worse, hacktivists were hard to defend against, as their attack strategies were much harder to predict.

 

The Verizon report documented 855 incidents worldwide, where 174 million records were stolen.

 

Recent hacktivist attacks were headed by the Anonymous hacker group and its allies Antisec and Lulzsec.

 

The groups managed to knock websites offline and steal large amounts of data from private companies and government agencies.

 

Hacktivism

 

"Hacktivism has been around for a some time but it's mainly been website defacements," said Wade Baker, director of research and intelligence at Verizon.

 

But in 2011, he said it was "more about going to steal a bunch of information from a company."

 

"Data theft became a mechanism for political protest," added Baker, adding it was hard to develop specific defenses against these attacks because they used tactics and techniques crafted for each occasion.

 

He said the attacks by hacktivists were not very common but often netted huge amounts of data.

 

Cybercriminals

 

In contrast, organized criminal groups accounted for only 35 percent of data pilfered from large companies.

 

Yet, Baker said cybercriminals continued to be a huge threat to large companies, and constantly battered their Internet defenses looking for weaknesses.

 

He said these attacks tended to be opportunistic and capitalized on any loopholes and vulnerabilities they found.

 

While few firms were going out of business or suffering lasting damage because of a data breach, he said, companies still had work to do to ensure they knew they were safe.

 

"The ability to detect a breach is quite poor across the board," said Baker. — TJD, GMA News