The ugly nature of hacktivism

UP till last year, Nov 5 held little significance for corporations in Singapore, but a spate of hacking incidents changed that. Almost overnight, CEOs were forced into acquaintance with the hacking collective called Anonymous, the Guy Fawkes celebration that it associated itself with and the cyber-havoc that it promised to wreak on that date.

This year, businesses and government agencies must again contemplate the month of November with a shudder, especially with the exposure of more than 300,000 K Box customers' personal data this week by hackers. Now, the karaoke bar chain faces an investigation by the personal data watchdog and ire from its customers. But even as we hold businesses accountable for data protection, we should also train our sights on the aggressors: the hackers.

Hackers are not new, but the hacktivist subset behind the attacks in recent years forms a more nefarious breed. The latter blend a criminal activity with the supposed legitimacy of an adopted cause - a far more worrisome approach than the financially motivated hackings of yore.

Last year's hacker scare which threatened to take down Singapore's infrastructure, for example, was packaged as a protest against the government's licensing regulation of news sites. In this week's K Box data leak, the hacktivist crusade is aimed at the recent toll charges at the Woodlands Checkpoint, no matter that K Box is more liable for the pitchy renditions of Unchained Melody sung on its premises than for the transport policy of a nation. If the toll charges are not reversed, the hackers have also threatened to similarly expose the databases of other local firms which are, presumably, as tenuously linked to the issue at hand as K Box is.

When a local actor asked his fans not to support the actions of Anonymous last year, hackers retaliated by taking over his social media accounts and shutting him out of them. This is a new and chilling assault that verges on terrorism, waged not on credit card numbers and online bank accounts, but on people's freedom to express dissenting views on any issue - one of the very freedoms for which the Internet has been so celebrated.

Left unchecked, hacktivism will be more than idle mischief; it will make a mockery of due process and undermine reasoned discourse. Some people leave room for hacktivism's legitimacy, likening it to other forms of social activism. It is an unworthy contemplation. Hacktivists tend to claim a representation of the everyman - the same everyman who becomes an unwitting casualty for some cause about which he was not even consulted. For this reason, it falls to the everyman and not just the government to recognise hacktivists for the tyranny they represent and censure them for it.

Some of the hackers from last year's Guy Fawkes season are already paying the legal price for their actions, through fines and probations. It is time that they, and others like them, pay the moral price too.