There can be many causes of a cyber attack on a vast array of different companies, these can include financial gain, scamming, political gain, and may possible reasons. Every year millions of dollars are lost through various cyber attacks using a variety of methods that we will explore in greater detail later in this paper. The question needing to be asked though is how harmful are these cyber attacks really as they happen more in more in our super-connected day and age. In January 2014 it was announced by the discount retailer Target that 70 million individuals information was stolen, including the credit card information of 40 million (Walters, 2014). This cyber attack was massive and made many news headlines when it happened in January. …show more content…
The boundaries between cyber terrorism and hacktivism are becoming more unclear. Hackers are becoming more skilled and involved in socio-political matters, not only in the U.S. but also internationally.(Aviles, 2015)
With hacktivism becoming so prominent it is difficult to get the skilled people needed to counteract these people. Hactivists are always politically and ideologically motivated to commit their attacks, take the group Anonymous for example they have where in 2015 they launched attacks in attempts to expose pedophile, (Aviles,pg 27 2015) while some might not like hacktivism and find these groups immature, it’s hard to find someone that’ll come close to defending the privacy of a pedophile. The group Anonymous is well known for the news for their cyber attacks with political motives usually coming in the defense of transparency and internet neutrality (Aviles,pg 23 2015). Anonymous is just one group of many, though, but they are usually the one getting the most attention on the news since most hackers will not like to be known even anonymous members are well anonymous in of themselves to protect themselves from the ramifications of their online activity hacking user accounts or hacking government and private servers. The group is known as anonymous even hacked ISIS accounts to “troll” them by it’s users, and anyone else was encouraged to “troll” and mock a terrorist organization (Ellyat,