10 Ways Hackers Have Punked Corporations and Oppressive Governments

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been much in the news lately, but hacktivism -- the nontraditional use of computing technology to advance political causes -- has been around for a long time. Here we offer a primer on 10 of the most significant hacktivist actions of all time.

1. Electronic Disturbance Theater

In 1998, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) developed and utilized a tool called Floodnet to target the Pentagon, the White House, the School of the Americas, the office of Mexico’s president, the Mexican Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, all in support of the Zapatista guerrilla movement in Mexico. Floodnet, which has subsequently been released as part of EDT’s “Disturbance Developer Kit,” allowed users to participate in a sit-in attack on these sites by a simple click on an icon on EDT's Web site. The Floodnet software then directed the participating computers to continually attack the target Web sites. It has been estimated that 10,000 people accessed Floodnet in this two-day action resulting in targeted servers being hit at a rate of 600,000 hits per minute.

2. The Internet Black Tigers (Sri Lanka)

An offshoot of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil, the Black Tigers showed that slick tools like Floodnet weren’t necessary to carry out a denial of service attack. The Tigers, protesting the Sri Lankan government, organized email bombings (flooding servers with email) that attacked the Sri Lankan consulates in Seoul and Ottowa, taking them offline. The message flooding the servers was also quite simple: "We are the Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to disrupt your communications."

3. Hong Kong Blondes

The Hong Kong Blondes was an underground network of Chinese students spread across at least three continents. It was started by Blondie Wong, who had reportedly witnessed his father being stoned to death during the 1966-'76 Cultural Revolution. Primarily protesting censorship and the violations of human rights that occurred in China, the group launched cyberattacks against the "Great Wall" -- a series of firewalls put in place to block access to Western Internet sites. With members operating inside and outside of China, the group claimed to have found significant security holes within Chinese government computer networks and claimed to have defaced government Web sites, torn down firewalls and even disabled Chinese communication satellites. They worked to forewarn political dissidents of imminent arrests.

4. WANK Worm

According to Julian Assange, the WANK worm is the first instance of hacktivism. On Oct. 16, 1989, during the Cold War when nuclear war was an immediate possibility, hackers hit the NASA computers with the WANK Worm. Two days prior to the launch of the plutonium-fueled Galileo space probe from the Kennedy Space Station, NASA employees logged on to see a humorous yet frightening welcome screen: "Your computer has been officially WANKed. You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war," and "Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat." The machines of the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA worldwide had been penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK (WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS) worm.

Once inside NASA’s system, the WANK worm began to travel through the network of interconnected computers, crawling through any holes in the security system. While the worm attack did not stop the shuttle launch, the recovery from the attack did require a massive expenditure of money and effort. Because the worm avoided attacking the computers in Australia and New Zealand and the worm source code showed specific instructions to avoid infecting machines in New Zealand, it is suspected that the attack originated from Australia. Some have credited the Melbourne-based hackers, Electron and Phoenix.