Encyclopedia of New Media

Hacktivism

Hacktivism uses the usual tools and strategies of hackers for explicit political ends. Hacktivists may target the Web sites of the organizations whose behavior, politics, or symbols they dislike. They can try to disrupt an organization's internal information networks, search for private information that will help a protest movement plan strategy or expose wrongdoing, or damage an organization by defacing or debilitating Web sites. Hacktivist goals can range from trying to spread the message of a social movement to trying to destroy a target organization's computing facility.

Some hacktivists use different kinds of viruses for political ends, constructing programs that copy themselves either independent of or related to a damaging instruction. For example, a hacker might write a quine virus program that generates complete copies of itself as part of its output, a worm virus program that ...

—Philip E. N. Howard