The Cyber Defense eMagazine November Edition for 2023

How To Combat the Mounting ‘Hacktivist’
Threat
By Manish Gohil, Senior Associate, Dragonfly
The war in Ukraine has seen the emergence of highly-disruptive cyber criminals, motivated less by money
than ideology. These ‘hacktivists’ are actively targeting businesses to further their interests – those
backing Moscow have been posing a threat to Western states as well as the operations and reputation
of organisations. Corporate exposure to pro-Russia hacktivism is substantial. Yet it does not appear to
be a priority concern for businesses, leaving them exposed to attacks in what is a rapidly evolving threat
landscape.
Hacktivist groups, both current and past, have sought to cause nuisance and disruption to both
governments and corporations, in line with their ideological goals. For example, we have seen this last
year with high-profile data breaches by an environmental hacker collective called ‘Guacamaya’, impacting
national governments and militaries in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Their tactics are not
particularly sophisticated (typically involving website defacements and Distributed Denial of Service or
DDoS attacks – that is the flooding of target networks with an overwhelming amount of traffic). The
operations are often timed to result in maximum disruption.
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