‘Hacktivism’ set to rise in 2023, say experts

In the past few months, various government bodies in India have been subject to such cyberattacks. Some of these were triggered by derogatory remarks made on Prophet Muhammad which led to reactions from a group, DragonForce Malaysia, which attacked more than 70 government institutions in the biggest attack of its kind in India.

Earlier this month, another group, Team Mysterious Bangladesh, claimed it had compromised the website Indian Central Board of Higher Education network.

Hacktivism, although not a new phenomenon, has become more organised and sophisticated after the Ukraine-Russia conflict, according to Check Point.

“Hacktivism is the act of hacking or breaking into a computer system for politically or socially motivated purposes,” said Sundar Balasubramanian, managing director, India & SAARC, at Check Point Software Technologies. “The hacktivist who does such acts, such as defacing an organisation’s website or leaking that organisation’s information aims to send a message through their activities and gain visibility for a cause they are promoting.”

According to Check Point, the second-most targeted in the world is the government sector. In the third quarter of this year, governments were on the receiving end of 1,564 weekly attacks on average, representing a 20% increase year-on-year, with the government sector in India reporting 3,354 attacks weekly per organisation in the past six months.

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DragonForce Malaysia claimed to have shut down the services of Host net India, which in turn resulted in multiple companies’ websites crashing.
Growing political and social dissent internally as well as between countries has been among the triggering factors for the rise of hacktivism, said experts.

A study by cybersecurity firm Trellix found that this is likely to become a bigger and more widespread threat in 2023, putting critical infrastructure at risk.

“As tensions in 2023 are expected to rise, we expect hacktivism to continue to scale as it suits the political agenda of opposing parties and offers perfect plausible deniability for actions since they are initiated and undertaken by activists,” said a Trellix report.

Another set of attacks targeted the Indian embassy in Israel and educational institutions such as Delhi Public School, Bhavans and other colleges across the country. In another attack, the official website of Thane police was hacked this year by a similar hacktivist group, according to Check Point.

Amit Jaju, senior managing director, Ankura Consulting Group (India), said geopolitically motivated attacks will proliferate across Asia and Europe, as will hacktivism fuelled by tensions between opposing political parties and vulnerabilities in core software supply chains.

“Even private sector businesses are highly susceptible to hacktivism, as competitors frequently engage expert services to execute lethal attacks damaging their opponents’ digital infrastructure, delaying new launches, profiteering from system downtime and exposing sensitive data,” said Jaju.

The easy availability of ransomware as a service and other distributed denial of service (DDoS) tools makes it easy for anyone to carry out such an attack.

“It is very likely that hacktivists will continue to target public administration systems especially those providing essential services such as utilities, financial services, and healthcare,” said Anand Tiwari, partner, Deloitte India.

The organisations being targeted serve as the gateway to public services and any impact on their web presence will cause major disruption and attract a lot of attention, he said.

Given that the intention behind such cyberattacks is to create chaos and gain visibility for certain causes, more such high impact attacks can be expected in the coming year, said Tiwari.