NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Anonymous and other “hacktivist” groups rose to new prominence in the cybercrime universe last year, and a new report shows that they made some serious mischief.
Verizon’s (VZ, Fortune 500) annual Data Breach Investigations Report, released Thursday, found that hacktivist groups were responsible for 58% of all data stolen last year. The telecom giant compiled data breach information from its customers and from law enforcement agencies in five countries.
The hacktivists’ success is partially due to the sharp rise in the number of attacks Anonymous and its peers launched last year. Verizon, which has been tracking hacktivist activity since 2004, said that last year’s collection of hacktivist breaches exceeded the total from all previous years combined.
That trend is “probably the biggest and single most important change” in this year’s report, said Bryan Sartin, head of Verizon’s data breach investigations team.
When online hacktivism first started in the 1990s, most of what the attackers accomplished were website defacements and denial of service attacks — annoyances more than serious problems.
How they hack you
But last year, Verizon began to notice what it calls a “major shift” in hacktivist activity. In addition to their usual methods, Anonymous and its cohorts were starting to launch data breach attempts against their targets, in what became a new “core tactic” for the groups.
“2011 saw a merger between those classic misdeeds and a new ‘oh by the way, we’re gonna steal all your data too’ twist,” Verizon said in its report. “This re-imagined and re-invigorated specter of ‘hacktivism’ rose to haunt organizations around the world.”
Here’s a startling twist: Verizon found that in many cases the denial of service attacks served as diversions. The hacktivists would often publicly announce a big attack, and the target would dedicate all of its resources to stopping that. While that was happening, hacktivists would go in unnoticed and steal some company data.
“It’s the old bait-and-switch,” said Sartin. “That concept, as basic as it seems, is a level of ingenuity we’ve never seen before.”