@Mastodon perhaps a #hacktivist inside the company can leak the code. 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔
#hacktivist
Anthony Stagliano – Disobedient Aesthetics: Surveillance, Bodies, Control (Rhetoric and Digitality)
#artandtechnology #arttech #digitalaesthetics #criticaltheory #criticalinformationstudies #hacktivism #hacktivist #hacking #hackart #sociallyengagedart #digitalactivism #mediaactivism #anonymity #techethics #datasovereignty #dataownership #dataprivacy #surveillance #surveillanceart #datacapture #biometricdata #emotionrecognition #mediatheory #mediastudies #digitalhumanities #informationtheory #digitalstudies #mediaculture #neuralarchive #neuralmag
Sanela Jahić – Under the Calculative Gaze
https://neural.it/2025/10/sanela-jahic-under-the-calculative-gaze/
#Underthecalculativegaze #hacktivism #hacktivismo #hacktivist #hacking #hackart #sociallyengagedart #digitalactivism #mediaactivism #communicationstrategies #ai #machinelearning #artandtechnology #arttech #mediainstallation #newmediaart #newmediaartist #mediaart #mediaartist #informationart #artistbook #memes #memeculture #1sand0s #necropolitics #criticaltheory #techethics #neuralmag #neuralmagazine
Anonymous hacked into Romanian prison system and cut off prisoners' sentences
#Anonymous #europe #hacker #hackernews #hackers #Hacktivist #news #romania
https://theaegisalliance.com/2025/10/25/anonymous-hacked-into-romanian-prison-system-and-cut-off-prisoners-sentences/?fsp_sid=1801
"Following the release of the graphic novel and its 2005 film adaptation, this design came to represent broad protest, later also becoming a symbol for the online #hacktivist group '#Anonymous' after appearing in web forums, used in Project Chanology, the #Occupy movement, Anonymous for the Voiceless, and other #AntiEstablishment protests around the world. This has led to the mask also being known by the alternate name of the Anonymous mask.
[...]
"The British comic book series #VForVendetta, which started in 1982, centers on a #vigilante's efforts to destroy an #authoritarian government in a #dystopian future United Kingdom. When developing the story, illustrator David Lloyd made a handwritten note on the intended #anarchist protagonist, V: 'Why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier-mâché masks, in a cape and a conical hat? He'd look really bizarre and it would give #GuyFawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every Nov. 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!' Writer Alan Moore commented that, due to Lloyd's idea, 'All of the various fragments in my head suddenly fell into place, united behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask.'
"Moore also noted, 'how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography.' "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask
#ResistFascism #ResistAuthoritarianism #UK #USA #USPol #NoKings #NoRulers
The Internet's Own Boy:
The Story of Aaron Swartz
Complete Documentary
[ENG]
#AaronSwartz #Hacktivist #Hacktivism #coding #Internet #InternetFreedom #FOSS #peertube #PDFTribute #FreeTheData #OpenAccess #Reddit
https://video.omniatv.com/w/41d34f4b-b763-42e7-be1c-064cc3be8c5e
We are Legion
The Story of the Hacktivists
Complete Documentary
[ENG] [Newer Version]
#WikiLeaks #Hacktivist #OperationChanology #WeAreLegion #UkraineSupport #JusticeForAaron #SonyHack #OpMasterCard #HomelessRights #OpTunisia #OpPayPal #OpVisa #Anonymous #ExpectUs #CyberActivism #InternetFreedom
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
“Peace through strength is possible,” Zelensky — Investigation: Despite sanctions, American trucks are being used by Russia to launch kamikaze drones — Unidentified drone enters Lithuania from Belarus amid rising tensions — Ukraine liberates Kindrativka village in Sumy Oblast amid ongoing Russian offensive … and more
https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/07/tuesday-july-29-2025/
An international operation coordinated by #Europol has disrupted the infrastructure of a pro - #Russian #hacktivist group known as #NoName057(16) that has been linked to a string of distributed denial-of-service (aka #DDoS) attacks against #Ukraine & its allies.
🔗 https://thehackernews.com/2025/07/europol-disrupts-noname05716-hacktivist.html
The hacktivist group Anonymous has been a controversial force in the digital world, often acting as both cyber vigilantes and advocates for online freedom. While some praise their efforts to expose corruption and fight for human rights, others argue that hacktivism is a form of digital...
We are incredibly proud to have assisted Europol 🇪🇺 in a global operation against the notorious pro-Russian #hacktivist group #NoName057(16) 🥳
Over the years, NoName057(16) has carried out thousands of #DDoS attacks against websites of western organisations and national critical infrastructure 🏛️ , aiming to spread pro-Russian ideology 🇷🇺 and stir up distrust and uncertainty in the western hemisphere 🌎 😵💫
They stare into the mirror and don't see the similarities.
ICE or Gestapo, it makes no difference when oppression is the mission.
The Eye sees.
We do not look away.
We will not be silent.
Mark it. Share it. Make them fear it.
👁️ #TheReckoningIsNow #TheEyeSees #AbolishICE #ResistFascism #CorruptionKills #hacktivist
If you build, paint, code, or create—let’s connect.
It's probably a good idea to do another #introduction since people change over time, ideally.
I'm haui. I help people & build things that help people. Big #foss enthusiast, #sysadmin by day and #hacktivist at night.
I think all people (and animals) are born equal and should stay that way.
I oppose #capitalism and embrace alternative systems. I dont care about #corporatedemocracy and manipulated "free speech".
I want thirst, hunger and homelessness gone, for everyone, by any means necessary.
India, Pakistan & Hacktivism – Past, Present & Future (Part One – Early Years)
Introduction
The “cyberwar” between Pakistani and Indian hacktivists and hackers is, I am certain, the longest running online conflict of its kind. The online hostilities between the two nations have been simmering away in some form or other since at least 1998, right through to the present day.
Explaining the roots of the conflict between India and Pakistan is beyond the scope of this blog. Since the creation of the separate states of India and Pakistan in 1947 there have been multiple wars and military standoffs, in particular relating to disputes over Kashmir and in response to acts of terrorism relating to Kashmir.
While researching this blog I also noticed at least two distinct outbreaks of hostilities between Bangladeshi and Indian hackers, that will probably become a separate blog.
This blog is partially inspired by current events as I am writing this introduction, India and Pakistan have announced a ceasefire after four days of intense military incursions from both sides. This blog is also fulfilling two important goals of this entire realhackhistory project, shining a light on overlooked hacktivism history and specifically on that history outside of Europe and North America.
I have done my best to avoid including screenshots or links to website defacements that include images of gore or language that is essentially just hate speech. Having said that be aware that this blog includes screenshots of, and links to, website defacements put together by people motivated by extremist ideologies and intense and long running nationalistic and religious conflict, the content they share on defaced websites reflects that.
I’ve separated the eras of the conflict into the time before Anonymous created a template for hacktivism that groups and individual hackers worldwide began to emulate and the time between the rise of Anonymous and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia which caused schisms and odd alliances in hacktivist circles worldwide.
From “Computer hackers step up their wars”, Chuck Shephard, Universal Press Syndicate, August 16th, 2003
While researching and writing this blog I’ve realized how little this whole history is documented in Western media (I hate that phrase but here we are), there are a number of academic papers on the topic but many that I have read include odd or obvious bias by the authors or plainly incorrect facts.
A lot of the other written sources are from nineties think tanks doing geo-political analysis of “cyber-terrorism” with a heavy military angle, breathlessly recounting that the Tamil Tigers had sent a lot of email spam once or twice and other such dark omens for the future of the internet.
From “Number of Hacks, Zombies Rises”, Dan Verton, Computerworld, 15th January 2001
In writing this blog I am not trying to unmask the members of any of these hacktivist groups or prove or disprove any involvement by nation state actors unless already documented elsewhere.
A lot of the hacktivism documented in this account involves website “defacement”, essentially this just means the unauthorized altering of a website by a hacker to include some kind of message.
The Pre-Anonymous Era
We are looking here at the ten years between 1998 and 2008, when Anonymous issued the “Message to Scientology” video which signalled a transition to hacktivism within the collective and created a more homogenized form of hacktivist tactics that we still see today.
If I had to sum up these early years it is a story of dominance by Pakistani hacktivists, against the backdrop of early often larger, but much shorter, cyberconflicts elsewhere that accompanied the Kosovo War or Chinese hacktivists attacking Indonesia and the United States.
This is the least documented part of this history, online journalism from back then is often lost or very hard to find in archives unless you know exactly what to look for. English language mainstream print media didn’t tend to cover any of the back and forth between Pakistani and Indian hackers, this is some of the earliest newspaper coverage I can find.
“Mideast ‘hacktivists’ take conflict online, launch attacks on Web”, D. Ian Hopper, AP, Herald-Journal, 4th November, 2000The article above, from late 2000, details breaches of a website for pro-Israeli lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the U.S. and websites in Israel as a result of hacktivists taking sides in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The article mentions that the hacktivists involved are believed to be from Pakistan and that “several Pakistani groups periodically target Indian web sites, condemning Indians for violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir.”
The specific group mentioned in relation to some of the defacements is GForce Pakistan, but in fact AIPAC was hacked by the Pakistani Hackerz Club. Interestingly in the AIPAC hack there was a theft and leaking of AIPAC emails and credit card information of at least 700 donors by P.H.C. member Dr Nuker.
Data theft and leaking was an extremely rare hacktivist tactic before Anonymous popularised it, Gabriella Coleman and Jeremy Hammond gave a great talk on the subject you can find below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYBbdvOyxr4
The earliest website defacements on either side I can find are by Pakistan aligned hacktivists Muslim Online Syndicate (or “mOs”) and by the Pakistan Hackerz Club (or “PakistanHC”), although the further back you go the less comprehensive website defacement archives are.
What is certain though is that in October of 1999 Pakistan Hackerz Club had started defacing Indian government websites and by December of that year they had also defaced at least one U.S. military site.
By May of 2000 Dr Nuker and P.H.C. were being mentioned in TIME Magazine.
P.H.C.’s leader, operating under the nom de hack “Dr. Nuker,” may be the most prolific hacker working today. Among the P.H.C.’s targets: websites of Lackland Air Force Base in Texas; the Karachi Stock Exchange; and the Department of Energy’s Albuquerque, N.M., home page, on which the club left a “Save Kashmir” message.
School for Hackers, Adam Cohen, Time Magazine, May 22nd 2000
Dr. Nuker was so well known that in July of 2001 an Indian hacker was sentenced to prison for hacking into a Mumbai police website and then using the copycat handle of “Dr. Neukar” in the defacement. Wired reported that another person who was arrested as part of that case by the Mumbai police Cyber Crime Cell investigation unit alleged torture and that one of his hands was broken during his interrogation.
The actual Dr. Nuker was the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, after an FBI investigation into the AIPAC hack, though I can find no evidence the suspect was ever apprehended. As part of the research for this blog I have filed a FOIA with the FBI for any records relating to the P.H.C.
Pakistani Hackerz Club defacement of Indian government Department of Electronics, October 1999CNN had an article on the Kashmir conflict and hacktivism which featured discussion of defacements by the Muslim Online Syndicate in March of 2000. The article reveals some interesting details, a member of the group claims that there are nine people in the crew. The article also states of the m0s that “they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they “have no more use” for the data or the server itself.” This mention of data on compromised servers being of use is once again very significant for the time.
m0s website defacement of Zee Internet India (https://www.zee.net.in), December 1999“The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to ‘heavy duty’ government servers,” the Muslim Online Syndicate representative tells CNN. “The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary.”
The article also references a mass website defacement by m0s of between five and six hundred websites hosted by Indian ISP IndiaLinks, that the group had compromised.
m0s website defacement of Indian Science Congress 2000 website (ISC2000.org.in), December 1999The defacement on the Indian Science Congress by m0s above made headlines in India, I was able to recover this brief article from Internet Archive.
“Pak. hackers put anti-India material on website”, The Hindu, December 30th, 1999The third major hacktivist group targeting Indian websites originating from or aligning with Pakistan in these early days was GForce Pakistan (sometimes “G-Force Pakistan”). If you were following defacements between 2000 and 2001 you probably saw some of the hundreds of GForce Pakistan defaces.
Wired wrote about the cyber elements of the Kashmir conflict in December of 2000 and specifically mentioned both GForce Pakistan and Dr. Nuker. Wired also spoke with Sundari Nanda, superintendent of police attached to the Indian Cyber Crime Unit who told them “We are working on ways to deal with hackers from Pakistan like G Force and Doctor Nuker” but also seemed to believe that website defacement archive attrition was itself a hacking group that “used to target Israeli sites and has now shifted its focus to India”.
Similar to the Muslim Online Brotherhood, GForce make explicit reference to the theft of data in some of their defacements. When they hacked a server related to the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research they included the following text:
India’s Atomic Power’s secrets are not secrets anymore…
thanks for sharing such valuable information with us you indians..GForce Pakistan defacement of igcar.ernet.in, January 1st, 2001
Reading technical analysis of GForce breaches from 2002 it seems that they generally targeted Linux and Solaris systems running services with well known vulnerabilities. The most interesting aspect of their attacks, by my estimation, was that if they hacked a machine that wasn’t running a web server they would take the time to install or enable an Apache webserver themselves so that they could upload a “defacement” and then publicize it through attrition or zone-h defacement archives.
GForce Pakistan defacement of U.S. Defense Test and Evaluation Professional Institute (https://www.dtepi.mil), October 2001The month after 9/11 GForce Pakistan hacked a server belonging to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the website defacement included the following text:
Though GForce Pakistan, condemns the attacks on US, We also stand by Al-Qaeda. Usama Bin Laden is a holy fighter, and whatever he says makes sense. While Sharon murders innocent mulims in palestine, Bush has dinner with him. Now what’s that suppose to mean? and is that not terrorism?
The BBC carried an article in October of 2001 noting that Pakistani Hackerz Club and GForce had hacked major Indian news websites to protest the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan and the Kashmir conflict.
Later that same month GForce defaced a U.S. military Uniformed Services University server and included the following text in the defacement.
what happened on 11 sept was a sad thing and we condemn it, but what’s happening right now in afghanistan with innocent muslims is also a form of terrorism.
We repeat that GForce Pakistan is not a group of cyber terrorists.
That was to be their final defacement, I can speculate that pledging allegiance to Al-Qaeda almost immediately after 9/11 was a step too far.
In 2002 a new hacktivist group called “Anti India Crew” (or IAC), appeared, hacked around forty Indian websites and then vanished. 2003 and 2004 saw a reduction overall in defacements of Indian websites. I’d speculate this drop in activity was because of improvements in security, the fact that low hanging fruit had already been breached or perhaps there was a change in attitudes towards political hacking within Pakistan at that time.
On the Indian side there was very little activity that I could find until July of 2001, when an Indian hacker known as “True Indian” hacked an unofficial Pakistani government site and a site belonging to militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba. According to articles from the time these hacks were a direct response to GForce Pakistan defacing numerous Indian websites. True Indian is quoted in an India Today article as saying “at times I feel like I am one among a billion. I work alone with modest resources.”
In 2003 a group called “Indian Snakes” modified what seems to have been a pre-existing e-mail worm that they had created (Yaha) to attack five selected Pakistani websites. Wired covered the worm as well, Michele Delio wrote that “Yaha.Q also posts a message about Pakistani hackers on the hard drive and displays messages to female virus writer Gigabyte, who disparaged one of the gang’s earlier versions of Yaha in her own virus, Yahasux”.
Indian Hackers Club defacement of ns1.speed.net.pk, June 2003Above we have a 2003 defacement by the Indian Hackers Club group, this is the first defacement attributed to this group that I can find. This website hack also serves as an announcement of the merging of two existing groups, the Indian Snakes and the Hindustan Hackers Organization (also known as “H2O”).
A 2010 phrack article about the Indian hacking scene states that the Indian Snakes were “a closed underground community of hackers who were on the top of the scene in the early 2000s.” I can’t find any defacements claimed by the Hindustan Hackers Organization. This sort of amalgamation or consolidation of smaller groups was a theme for both sides in the conflict as the 2000s went on.
Indian Hackers Club defacement of http://www.pmi-pakistan.org, March 2004Indian Hackers Club defaced just over 250 websites throughout 2003 and 2004 before seemingly going defunct. Websites defaced by IHC seem to have primarily been non-Pakistani though, this is in keeping with defacement crews starting to prioritize quantity over quality or idealogical motivations as the 2000s went on.
Alongside Indian hacktivist groups like Indian Hackers Club were groups like INDIAN TIGERS, who hacked a handful of Pakistani government and education sites in late 2003 and then went inactive.
INDIAN TIGERS defacement of Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal (PMB) (https://www.pbm.gov.pk), September 2003Between 2004 and 2007 I can’t see any really significant activity from either side, safe to assume there was a steady back and forth of defacements though.
Before I close this first decade out I want to clear up disinformation about the hacking of Bhabha, India’s main nuclear research center, back in 1998.
milw0rm defacement of Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) (https://www.barc.ernet.in), June 1998This hack is listed in numerous academic and news sources as one of the first major Pakistani hacktivist attacks on India, the truth is that milw0rm was not a Pakistani group. The actual hackers involved were interviewed by Forbes after the hack and were reported as being a 15 year old American and an 18 year old Serbian.
t3k-9, the American teen hacker, had seen a news segment on Indian nuclear tests and got on a search engine, found a domain that looked interesting and managed to gain access, that’s the essence of this story.
“Hackers Hit India And Military”, Janelle Carter, Associated Press, 7th June, 1998It is very disheartening to see sloppy research turned into articles and academic papers that then start a cascade of references, never actually touching primary sources that would set the record straight.
Conclusion
That brings us up to 2008, just before the dawn of Anonymous shift to hacktivism and terror attacks in India that were carried out by Pakistani militants.
I’ll be charting how the cyber-conflict evolves and begins to try to keep pace with, and mimic, events on the ground in India and Pakistan.
As the conflict itself changes the groups that are involve shift too, not just in terms of the names of the factions involved but how they come together and the members behave. We are on the precipice of personal brands for blackhat hackers who are desperate for e-fame.
If I missed something important in this first part please reply with a comment here or come find me on Bluesky.
#Anonymous #AntiIndiaCrew #defacement #DrNuker #GForcePakistan #GForcePakistan #hacker #hackers #hacking #hacktivism #hacktivist #HindustanHackersOrganization #history #India #Indian #IndianHackersClub #IndianSnakes #INDIANTIGERS #milw0rm #MuslimOnlineSyndicate #Pakistan #PakistanHC #Pakistani #PakistaniHackerzClub #Phrack #yahaVirus
Via #MEDIAite @ 2:32pm ET on June 22, 2025
Multiple #SocialMedia watchdogs confirmed that an #Iranian-aligned #hacktivist group called “313 Team” claimed responsibility for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (#DDoS) attack on Trump’s #TruthSocial platform just hours after the U.S. strikes. Truth Social went down shortly after 8 p.m. ET on Saturday — moments after #Trump announced the strikes on his account.
Hacker group Predatory Sparrow claims (not verified) to have taken down Iran’s Bank Sepah. Reports from inside Iran indicate “widespread banking disruptions” with several Bank Sepah branches closed on Tuesday, and customers told they were unable to access their accounts.
Predatory Sparrow previously executed cyber attacks on Iranian steel plants and gas stations. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/pro-israel-hacktivist-group-claims-responsibility-for-alleged-iranian-bank-hack/ #CyberAttack #PredatorySparrow #CyberHack #BankSepah #Iran #Banking #hacktivist #Hackers
Another prominent anti #Iran #hacktivist group Edaalate Ali posting longitude and latitude to what I would infer they hope or wish was a target for the bombings.
Anti #Iran #hackers Lab Dookhtegan posting this on their Telegram as the bombs fell on Iran, I’ll be checking in on various #hacktivist group reactions as the day goes on.
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst