The new era of hacktivism

On August 27, three days after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, a strange channel on the messaging platform announced that it had “defaced” the home pages of several French sites. Using the hashtag #FreeDurov, the group known as Stucx Team claimed to have hacked several French sites, as a sign of support for dual French-Russian nationality.

In the same post, the online collective, whose exploits were of relative importance, thanked its “brothers in arms”, other groups with equally evocative names: Moroccan Black Cyber ​​Army, Holy League , Khalifa Cyber ​​Crew and Ripper Sec. Stucx Team, which describes itself as a coalition of Muslim activists in Malaysia, is just the tip of the iceberg: in recent years, several companies and computer security experts have observed a resurgence of hacktivism, a term coined as a contraction of “hacker”. and “activism,” a form of online activism popularized by Anonymous.

NoName057, Anonymous Sudan, Philippines Exodus Security, Indian Cyber ​​Force: It has become difficult to make sense of the jungle of names that have proliferated, especially on the messaging platform Telegram. It is also difficult to assess their real impact.

A new push

In fact, many of these groups have claimed responsibility for unsophisticated actions. The specialist firm Group IB analyzed the activity of Mysterious Team Bangladesh, a group of hacktivists with “political and religious” motivations, who since 2020 have targeted India and Israel in particular. The company determined that nearly 90% of the actions claimed by the collective were simple direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The rest of the claimed actions consisted of defacements, i.e. modifying the home pages of generally poorly secured websites. Another major modus operandi of this new generation of groups is that of “hack and leak”, that is to say the dissemination of confidential information and stolen documents, most of which are unverifiable.

These methods would constitute a “direct legacy of Anonymous”, according to American researcher Gabriella Coleman, specialist in the informal collective which emerged in the early 2010s and which has since fallen into oblivion. But why, all of a sudden, are new factions claiming to operate via this independent mode of action?

Paradoxically, the first place to look for this information could be among state actors, as evidenced by the Handala collective. On September 18, the day after the explosion of thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members in Lebanon and Syria, the collective promised to reveal the truth about the attack and began distributing documents. These documents, whose authenticity The World could not be verified, were described as having been stolen from companies that collaborated with Israeli intelligence services to carry out the pager operation.

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