Ask HN: What Ever Happened to Hacktivism? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Ever Happened to Hacktivism?

19 pointsmerpkz10 comments

In light of recent events it is clear that some part of American society does recognize the great injustice being done by the corporations and some people seem to support vigilante bringing justice by any means possible, even straight up murder, which is kind of inefficient - they will always find a new CEO. So this inevitably begs the question of what ever happened with hacktivism as a whole? That used to be a thing 10 - 15 years back when I was more impressionable person and it seemed to me like it could bring the change to status quo. These days you can hardly hear anymore about any targeted attacks on greedy corporations with goal to release information to bring them down. It sure looks like most of the hackers have sold out to those corporations for profit or even for free doing bug bounty programs, ignoring the injustice being done by those very same corporations. So what happened to hacktivism? How did it fizzle out after anonymous, lulzsec almost completely?

That brand of "hacktivism" was based on embarrassment. Embarrassment went away. Internet security got so bad, and leaks so common, that the impact evaporated. When Barrett Brown went down for Stratfor it was because he embarrassed the wrong people. Today that kind of breach happens every other month without the help of any hostile hackers.

Also companies became brazen [0]. It became okay to run a company like NSO (Pegasus) or simply publish your grotesquely immoral and very illegal hacker manifesto... as a "product", so long as you're doing it for money (ideological ends are still frowned upon).

Hacktivists can't compete with that.

Indeed, exposure of wrongdoing became a useless tool in everyone's hands. Before the wave of regulation, when Ian Levy, was the CTO at NCSC he gave a talk saying how we could "shame" hopeless BigTech companies into better security. Though I admired his attitude it was clear to me that would not work. Heavy regulation was gonna come because BigTech has no shame.

At the same time enshitification happened. That meant that the consequences of leaks and outages became much less. Where else are you gonna go? Microsoft can go down for days and despite the harms there is no reckoning. Everyone is simply stuck in a dead-end dependency on monopoly services. We just take an early lunch, call it "internet weather" and to hell with the economy. If "hactivists" took out half the internet tomorrow it would be "business as usual" for most people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382815

Have you not heard of Distributed Denial of Secrets?

Large entities are hacked and leaked constantly, it's just not reported on much in the mainstream press:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets#...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-hacker-who-archived-parl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueLeaks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Content_scraping

We live in an age where public outcry gets a site booted off the net, and just prior, some hacker siphons up every bit of data about it's users.

Sounds like hacktivism to me.

It's still popular, perhaps more ongoing than ever, but there are two things for the lessen public impact:

1) Security at a base level is much better than it was in the 2000s, and so it becomes more technically impressive to outline your exploits to your own personal CV. A "LOIC" DDoS attack, or a SQL injection are basic stuff now.

2) The media does not report on it, just as the times have changed in that they don't report on manifestos by publishing the text, or even mention that they exist except in extreme passing as a method to lessen people having access or knowledge of them to become "inspired", they don't report on them.

3) Corporations cover up any breaks in their security as soon as possible, a lot of corporations are built on security and they do everything they can to hide any attempts of security lapses.

Americans are too busy fighting each other.

A Bushism from decades seems relevant:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." – Washington, D.C., August 5, 2004. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism

Perhaps the hactivist groups were too decentralised for them to be cohesive enough to stage properly coordinated attacks that could make any noticeable impact?

I’ve learned about some pretty impressive cyberattacks, that have made significant impact (ie, WannaCry), but they’re not usually executed by a decentralised unit of uncoordinated millennials that can’t decide unanimously on the right ideology to justify their behaviour.

How morally bankrupt and pathetic you must be to consider killing a person “inefficient”.

“Activists” like this create much more harm than good for society. Mainly because their goal and general attitude is “destroy” rather than “create”. Secondly because without a decent actionable definition of justice they look at things from their own subjective and extremely biased feeling of what is just. Arrogant, childish and dangerous position.

Would you care to define “justice”?

Wipe a tiny amount of Grice’s Razor over the post and you should inevitably reach a grossly different interpretation. TLDR “where is our digital Robin Hood?”

Robin hood is also a terrible idea.

it was successfully destroyed by the CIA

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