People are always at risk of consequence from cyber threats. Some bad actors make use of phishing where people are tricked to enter their details while they think they are on the right website. Some of these are sent through email that looks like original emails.
Hacktivists
Hacktivists are groups of criminals who unite to carry out cyber attacks in support of political causes. Hacktivists typically target entire industries but sometimes attack specific organisations that they feel don’t align with their political views or practices. In some cases, hacktivists have targeted organisations not based on the victim organisation’s beliefs but the clients and partners they do business with. Among the best-known hacktivist groups is “Anonymous,” which has carried out hundreds of cyber-attacks including Operation Payback, which included a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted victims’ websites, preventing legitimate users from accessing them.
A DDoS attack is launched from multiple computers running specialised software that generates a large amount of traffic directed to a website with the intent of overwhelming the system so that it stops responding to legitimate user requests.
Countries that are unable to match the U.S. in terms of military technology have resorted to cyberwarfare, a method that can still do a lot of damage in terms of economic cost. Various agencies in the U.S. are under constant attack from numerous countries. In response, the U.S. military is training war veterans and wounded soldiers who can no longer fight in the field in the art of cyberwarfare to become cyber warriors and continue defending their country in this new form of battle One law firm fell victim to a cyber-attack from a hacktivist group due to the law firm’s representation of a client linked to a high-profile legal case the hacktivist group stole emails from the law firm, many of which were protected under attorney-client privilege and publicly posted them on the internet. At the time of this writing, there are over 80 different hacktivist groups in existence. The email often includes links that take them to a masquerading website.
Through this, people lose their login details to hackers. There is some kind of hackers who are motivated because they do not agree with some political and social policies of the government. They are often referred to as Hacktivists. At times, Hackers can set up botnets on servers without the knowledge of the Admin. A botnet is a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners’ knowledge. E.g to send spam emails.
Action Point
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