If there was an award for world’s leading hacktivist group it would have gone to none other than Anonymous!
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us at all. Of late, the world famous group of hacktivists Anonymous has once again topped the list of the most active hacker group so far in 2016 and hence, we can term it as the leader of all hacktivists. Turk Hack Team (THT), New World Hacking (NWH), and Ghost Squad Attackers (GSH) are the other groups that are most active this year after Anonymous. #OpTrump, #OpKilling Bay, #OpWhales, #OpIsrael, and #OpAfrica are the top five hack campaigns that managed to garner highest media attention and did maximum damage during the first few months of 2016.
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The news has been revealed to us by SurfWatch Labs and the results have been obtained after analyzing the data from social media hype and threat intelligence. The data also revealed that over the years, motivation towards hacktivism has declined and decelerated as well but still it can cause enough damages to attract the attention from all mainstream media platforms including social media. In this regard, it is important to note that governmental agencies and institutions have been affected the most by these notorious groups of hacktivists. The highest publicity was garnered by the COMELEC hack carried out by the Philippines division of Anonymous.
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And how can we forget the fact that right from the start of 2016, a majority of the most high-profile and seemingly well-secured websites have been attacked by these hacktivist groups? These include a range of DDoS attacks on BBC, a bank of Greece, Nissan and of course Donald Trump’s websites. These attacks were conducted under the #OpTrump, #OpIcarus and #OpKillingBay campaigns. The reason why SurfWatch hasn’t included #OpIcarus in its list of top five campaigns is that it is still going on and hasn’t concluded as yet. Other critically important receivers of hack attacks include the Bank of Cyprus, NASA’s internal network data leak, LinkedIn’s massive data leak and the removal of ISIS’s Twitter handles soon after the attacks in Belgium.
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The rise of Anonymous as the world’s leading hacktivist group and its continued reign as the number one hacking group is indeed unbelievable as the group has surpassed various bigwigs in the hacking world like the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) and Lizard Squad. Let’s wait and watch if these once most dreaded hacking groups will be able to reclaim their position in the remaining months of 2016 or Anonymous continues to enjoy the stardom.
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