On August 27, three days after the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, a strange channel announced by messenger that it had “defaced” the home page of several French websites. Using the keyword #FreeDurov, the Stucx Team group denounces, in support of the Franco-Russian citizen, the hacking of several French sites.
In the same publication, this online collective with relative feat thanks its “brothers in arms”other groups with equally evocative names: Morocco Black Cyber Army, Holy League, Khalifa Cyber Crew and Ripper Sec. Because Stucx Team, which presents itself as a coalition of Malaysian Muslim activists, is just the tip of the iceberg: in recent years, several companies and computer security experts have noted a strong return to hacktivism, a contraction of “hacker” and “activism,” a form of online activism popularized by Anonymous.
NoName057, Anonymous Sudan, Philippines Exodus Security, Indian Cyber Force… It is difficult to navigate the jungle of names that have multiplied, particularly in Telegram messages. It is also difficult to assess its true impact.
A new boom
In fact, many claim that unsophisticated actions have been carried out. The specialized company Group IB thus analyzed the activity of Mysterious Team Bangladesh, a group of hacktivists with “political and religious” and which mainly targets, since 2020, India and Israel. The company determined that almost 90% of the actions claimed by the class were simple denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The rest of the complaints refer to defacements, actions that consist of modifying the home page of sites that are generally not well protected. Another great modus operandi that we find among this new generation: hack and leakthat is, the dissemination of confidential information and stolen documents, most of the time unverifiable.
These methods are directly “The legacy of Anonymous”estimates with World the American researcher Gabriella Coleman, a specialist in this informal collective that marked the beginning of the 2010s and which has since fallen into disuse. But why are new factions suddenly demanding this independent mode of action?
Paradoxically, a first way must be sought by the States, as demonstrated by the example of the Handala collective: on September 18, the day after the explosion of thousands of pagers belonging to members of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the collective promises the truth about this attack and begins to distribute documents. The latter, including the world The authenticity could not be verified, they are presented as stolen from companies that collaborated with Israeli intelligence to carry out this operation.
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