Welcome to Living and Leading in An Era of Super-Transparency, Part 3.
Now, I asked you to take a look at some videos before we
started this part of the lecture and
the lectures that you've been watching were about this group of people.
Group of people who have come to be known as hacktivists.
In particular, a group called Anonymous.
Anonymous in a way is not exactly a group, because it doesn't have fixed membership.
The people who are a part of it don't necessarily know who the other
members are.
What they have in common is this idea that hacktivism can
help promote certain causes.
And I mention them, because this is a group of people who just might know
about you or your company than you do and
they certainly know more than you think they do.
You've seen some examples of this in the two videos.
One example from the Rehtaeh Parsons story and
you saw the Anonymous video that goes with the Rehtaeh Parsons's story.
This is a very tragic story,
because Rehtaeh Parsons actually committed suicide after the events in this.
But in the aftermath,
when people were extremely indignant about what had happened and
felt that the law enforcement in the Eastern Canada region had not done
what they were supposed to, all of this information went viral.
The tragedy went viral, the fact that maybe the law enforcement
people had not moved fast enough on the alleged perpetrators of what
was allegedly a rape and there was an outpouring of sympathy and dismay.
And interestingly, I think, very interestingly,
there were direct calls for Anonymous to become involved.
So this is kinda like in the old days of Batman comic books.
You may remember, Batman wasn't actually a police officer.
But when the police couldn't solve the crime, people put on the bat signal.
The bat signal was a call to what was, in essence, a vigilante named Batman and
what's going on in cyberspace via Twitter and so forth is very much like that.
The local crime fighters can't solve the crime,
so we call on this group called Anonymous.
And Anonymous, as you can see on this slide, responds.
They will be on the cause and in the very next day,
the Rehtaeh Parsons case was reopened by the police.
Of course, the triggering event of Rehtaeh's suicide is that they
had closed the case and said that they would not lay charges.
Interestingly, the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
the national police force, found it important to state that important
new information did not come from an online source.
So they are denying the influence of Anonymous in this case, but
the timing is quite suspicious.
You've also seen the story, a video about the story of the HBGary case.
Now this one's particularly interesting,
because these people are IT security experts.
They're not only IT security experts, they are selling their services to
the intelligence services in the United States.
So you would think people that can sell IT security services to the intelligence
services in the US should be among the most sophisticated IT security people
in the world and they should have some of the most sophisticated defenses.
You can see their clients include the Departments of Defense, State,
Homeland Security, Energy, and Justice.
So these are people who should really know their IT security stuff and
should have protected their data very well.
But as you've seen, Mr. Barr, who had this idea that he was gonna go after Anonymous,
really had a really difficult time with the Anonymous hackers.
They basically, as you've seen from the video, came in and took him out.
Took his company out in a sort of hacking rampage.
So if it could happen to this company, of course, the point is how are regular
companies gonna defend themselves from motivated hackers who are trying to
break down the boundaries between the information they would like to have and
that you don't want them to have in the cloud or the Internet?
If we take a look at some headlines from the Boston Globe,
it's fairly easy to get excited and enthusiastic,
perhaps even supportive of Anonymous activities when
they're helping apprehend rapists, when they're targeting
companies that perhaps are a little bit too proud of their
information technology capabilities like HBGary.
But it is important to realize that if you're starting to feel some sympathy for
these group that they can also do considerable harm.
In 2014, around Easter, the hacker group Anonymous
decided to target a medical organization in the Boston area.
The story is that there was a young woman,
a teenager who was brought to the hospital ill.
Her parents claimed that she had a rare genetic disease.
The doctors after examining her closely were afraid that her parents were
harming her.
And so they instigated removing her temporarily from her home in
the interest of making sure that she was adequately protected.
And the place that Anonymous wanted to target was
the organization where she was placed,
the temporary medical facility where this young lady was placed.
The problem is they didn't know the IP address of that organization.
So they targeted a range of IP addresses.
And in effect, they took down the entire medical establishment in the Boston area,
an entire set of hospitals and
medical facilities in a way that could have caused real harm to real people.