How Hacktivism Affects Us All In December 2010, a group of
nearly 3000 activists under the name “Operation Payback”
launched online attacksagainst PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa,
briefly knocking the three financial services’ sites offline and
attempting to prevent consumers from accessing their online
banking services. The activists retaliated against the three
companies for severing ties with WikiLeaks, an online repository
for whistleblower data that had recently included thousands of
secret communications from the U.S. State Department and other
world governmental agencies. Nine months later more than a dozen
people--most between the ages of 19 and 24--were arrested in
connection with these denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, even as
new attacks were hitting corporate, military, and government
sites worldwide. A combination of hacking and social activism,
hacktivism is defined as the use of digital tools in pursuit of
political ends. The earliest example dates back to 1999, when
the loose network known as Cult