To many people, hacking is hacking with no shades of grey to consider. Furthermore, most people contend that hacking must be malicious and, certainly, against the law. In short, hacking is bad, no matter how you slice it. Those views run contrary to the concepts of ethical hacking and hacktivism. In fact, so broad is hacktivists' purview that the practice has been subdivided into types, such as media hacking - passing on a message to as many recipients are possible via unusual and/or innovative electronic media usage; and culture jamming, which entails challenging and/or criticising the political status quo. And then, there's reality hacking, which essentially amounts to virtual civil disobedience. That type of hacktivism is further subdivided into categories.
| Reality hacking might consist of: |
|---|
| Virtual sit-ins: when large groups of activists drastically slow or crash a website by accessing it at the same time. |
| URL redirections send you to a different webpage than the one whose address you typed. |
| Virtual sabotage: any form of web-based obstruction, destruction, disruption or subversion. |
| Website defacements change the appearance of the hacked entity's webpage. |
| Information theft may be corporate or personal, with financial gain secondary to the intended goal of causing harm. |
| Denial of service attack means to make a network resource unavailable. |
| Website parodies are aggregates of other sites' contents, presented with a different user interface. |
The Difference Between Hacktivism and Ethical Hacking
The general public suffers some confusion over hacktivism - a portmanteau of hacking and activism, and ethical hacking; most likely because activism is presumed to be positive and beneficial. That's not necessarily true. For instance, promoting propaganda - about a company, political party or the environment is a type of negative activism. Note that propaganda, in this sense, is of the distorting, misleading kind. Not all propaganda is bad.
In certain instances, hacktivism can be considered negative activism even if it's done for the greater good. Hacktivist groups may penetrate a computer network to obtain information that will be used against the organization or entity they oppose, be it a corporation or a government - as is often the case.
By contrast, ethical hacking is sanctioned by the entity being hacked. Ethical hackers are contracted by an organization, company or individuals (and sometimes the government) to probe their computers and networks for vulnerabilities that, if left alone, malicious hackers might exploit. These professionals may then be tasked with patching, plugging or otherwise fixing the gaps or they may be limited to finding them so that the organizations' IT department can fix them on their own.
The key difference between ethical hacking and hacktivism is license. Ethical hackers have permission to hack while hacktivists generally don't. They infiltrate without their targets' knowledge to advance their activist's agenda; usually political but sometimes for other causes. Regardless of whether the hacker is a white or blue hat - permitted hacker, or a hacktivist (grey or black hat hackers), they follow a code of ethics.
What are Hacker Ethics
A short note before moving on: to understand the reference to different-coloured hacker hats, you must have a clear understanding of why hackers hack. Regardless of why hackers hack, the hacker culture follows ethical principles:
- Deontological ethics: ethical behaviours within the practice of the hack, not on its consequences.
- Utilitarian ethics: which actions will produce the most good for all concerned.
Now, for a bit more clarity. Deontological ethics state that, if everyone in a society can perform an action equally well, without causing any destruction, it is considered a just act. This school of thought posits that an action is moral if it follows all of the rules that underpin it - it follows all the laws and is for the greater good. Thus, this school of thought is often called rules-based ethics. Without getting too deeply into such a ponderous subject, this parallels the philosophy that Immanuel Kant espoused. Applying Kantian philosophy to hacktivism, we find a disconnect because, clearly, not everybody can hack and, if everyone did, it would sow mass discord. By that logic, then, hacktivism must always be bad - but that's not always the case.
While hacktivists constantly struggle with this ethical dilemma, the utilitarian aspect brings them closer to what their purpose means to them. These hackers hack for what they perceive as the greater good. They don't follow mainstream rules or established laws and they hold themselves blameless for rule-breaking because they're neither disrupting society nor personally gaining from their activities. They're merely exposing to the public the misdeeds that offensive government, corporation or organization has been committing.
The hacktivist group Anonymous has 'declared war' on terrorism. They've set themselves to hacking terrorist groups' social media accounts and defacing or taking down their propaganda websites. In doing so, they demonstrate their utilitarian ethics. Surely, stomping out terrorism is the greatest good for all? Understand that there is a difference between cyberattacks and hacktivism. While both have a distinct aim - perhaps more than one, cyberattacks are conducted usually for some sort of material gain while hacktivism is bringing about positive societal change.
Understanding the Hacker Culture
From the examples we've cited so far, you might have guessed that ethical hackers and hacktivists have good intentions and motives, even if their actions might not fit into the definition of what is legally right. What's not so easy to understand is what could compel a person to seat themselves at their keyboard for hours on end for what could be an exercise in futility? After all, not every ethical hack finds vulnerabilities in the systems they probe and not every hacktivist initiative meets with success - much to their frustration, at times. And yet, they persevere.
The culture underpinning this sort of activity is both a unifying feature and the driving motivation. It's the pleasure of meeting a challenge head-on and overcoming it, finding new and interesting ways to engineer solutions and the intellectual effort that few who don't engage in could understand the rewards of. There's an element of discovery to hacking; a sense of exploration that fires the hacker spirit. A gleeful attitude fostered by the idea that anything is possible and will likely come to pass if only the right combination of keystrokes and code can be found. The excitement of labouring at the edge of a perpetual new frontier, along with the significance and meaning that this work imbues them with an overwhelming sense of positivity. Throughout the hacking community, the general attitude is that:
- access to all software and hardware, as well as every learning resource, should be unencumbered and absolute.
- Computers are functional, but also for creating beautiful works. They impact the human experience for the better, not worse.
- People, in general, but hackers, in particular, should be judged by their skills and enthusiasm, not external criteria such as race, colour, creed, gender or orientation; or by one's status or socioeconomic - or any other position. Nor should any level of education play any part in judging a member of the community (or anyone else in the wider world).
- Information should be free and accessible to all.
Framing hackers in this light makes you wonder less about what hacking is and more about why we don't all embrace this attitude, doesn't it? It also raises the question of why some hackers seem intent on doing bad. To be sure, there are malicious hackers out there and they do cause substantial damage but, by far greater in number are the legions who adhere to their communities' ethics and principles.
The Importance of White Hat Hacking
One group of hackers who do not stray far from those principles are white hat hackers. As the colour of their designated 'hat' implies, they are of the pure-good variety. These programming-savvy people use their knowledge, skills and abilities to promote security within systems and networks and devise innovative tools and code to help thwart ill-intentioned hackers. Cultural aside: these hat designations come from old Western shows and films, wherein the good guy always wore white and the bad guy(s) were inevitably clad in black.
The hacktivist group LulzSec, now disbanded, often engaged in white hat hacking initiatives despite being thought of as malicious black hatters. While they were active, this group of hacktivists targeted corporations by exploiting security vulnerabilities they found in those systems. The trouble was that they didn't quietly point these cyber weaknesses out; they boasted about their gained access and made public their attacks in the most self-incriminating way possible. They released the data they had collected to the public. Sometimes, it was just a matter of contestant lists for reality television shows but, often, it was customer data and weak passwords.
For all that LulzSec's forays helped to improve both individual internet users' and corporations' security - standard white hat activity, their practices violated hacking ethics, which made them reviled both in hacking circles and highly sought after by American law enforcement.
Their mocking attitude probably didn't help their case much, either. So, whether you aspire to become a hacktivist, someone who doesn't mind executing a few less-than-legal turns to work for the greater good (also known as red hat hacking) or wish to stay on the white hat side of hacking, understand that you will follow ethical principles and guidelines. But first, you have to be a green hat hacker. Find out if the game, Mass Effect, can help you learn how to hack.
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