In the online space, there’s almost always something going haywire whether it’s a function breaking or a connection being severed, but today we will talk about intentional issues caused by individuals often known as “cyber criminals”. It’s not difficult to pinpoint any particular incidents caused online, so let’s take a look at one of them and see why it’s such an incident.
Anonymous Comes to Town: The hackers who took on high school sexual assault in Ohio by The Guardian, uploaded on April 18th, 2019
The video covers a shocking event of a minor high school girl who got sexually assaulted and drugged by students of the football team at the Steubenville High School in Steubenville, Ohio. What’s even more shocking was when it was revealed that this event wasn’t even informed to the media, Steubenville kept this incident a secret to “protect” their football team. Sweeping it under the rug and leaving it to be forgotten. At this point you may be wondering how this is meant to tie with cyber criminals and how it’s a cybersecurity event. Well the reason is that a “well-known” group of hackers by the name of Anonymous caught wind of this situation, and used their cybersecurity-piercing skills to investigate on this incident and bring light of it to the face of social media. Anonymous called this situation “Operation Rollredroll” as they hacked the official website of the Big Red Steubenville High School, gaining access to it so they could reveal the evidence of the sexual assault while threatening to reveal personal information behind it. With enough time and attention to this incident, the small town was exposed for its heinous secrets and the football players responsible for the assault were punished and charged.
Anonymous is often “infamous” for their widespread and almost undetectable presence on the web, being a decentralized and internationally collective movement of activists or what people call “hacktivists”. They’re often associated with their cyberattacks against several governments, institutions of governments, agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology. The biggest factor about them is living up to their name. Almost no one is able to find out or has even know Anonymous’ true identity, who made the hacker group, and what else they plan to do with their powers. No confirmed damage costs were found after the Operation Rollredroll incident, but one person who assisted Anonymous revealed himself as Deric Lostutter and was raided by the FBI for it, filing a legal case against him for helping the hacker group.
(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/steubenville-hacker/314509/)
If there were to be a lesson from all of this, it should be pretty obvious- don’t make the same mistake those football players did. Don’t do ANYTHING as malicious like that, because you never knew if a certain anonymous figure could be watching you right now to collect that evidence and eventually turn it against you…