Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions, and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.
UC Browser is a web browser developed by mobile internet company UCWeb, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. It was the most popular mobile browser in India, Indonesia, and Mali, as well as the second-most popular one in China as of 2017. Its world-wide browser share as of May 2022 is 0.86% overall according to StatCounter.
Cyberwarfare by China is the aggregate of cyberattacks attributed to the organs of the People's Republic of China and various related advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.
On August 31, 2014, a collection of nearly five hundred private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and swiftly disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The leak was dubbed "The Fappening" or "Celebgate" by the public. The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.
PT Tokopedia is an Indonesian e-commerce company. Tokopedia is a subsidiary of a new holding company called GoTo, following a merger with Gojek on 17 May 2021. It is one of the most visited e-commerce platforms in Indonesia.
Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, detailing the activities and capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dating from 2013 to 2016, include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, the operating systems of most smartphones including Apple's iOS and Google's Android, and computer operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. A CIA internal audit identified 91 malware tools out of more than 500 tools in use in 2016 being compromised by the release. The tools were developed by the Operations Support Branch of the CIA.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app or the web.
Charming Kitten, also called APT35, Phosphorus or Mint Sandstorm, Ajax Security, and NewsBeef, is an Iranian government cyberwarfare group, described by several companies and government officials as an advanced persistent threat.
Many countries have imposed past or ongoing restrictions on the video sharing social network TikTok. Bans from government devices usually stem from national security concerns over potential access of data by the Chinese government. Other bans have cited children's well-being and offensive content such as pornography.
Data breach incidences in India were the second highest globally in 2018, according to a report by digital security firm Gemalto. With over 690 million internet subscribers and growing, India has increasingly seen a rise in data breaches both in the private and public sector. This is a list of some of the biggest data breaches in the country.
ShinyHunters is a black-hat criminal hacker group that is believed to have formed in 2020 and is said to have been involved in numerous data breaches. The stolen information is often sold on the dark web.
There are reports of TikTok censoring political content related to China and other countries as well as content from minority creators. TikTok says that its initial content moderation policies, many of which are no longer applicable, were aimed at reducing divisiveness and were not politically motivated.
In 2020, the United States government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
The Telegram Messenger application has been blocked by multiple countries.
Lapsus$, stylised as LAPSUS$ and classified by Microsoft as Strawberry Tempest, is an international extortion-focused hacker group known for its various cyberattacks against companies and government agencies. The group was active in several countries, and has had its members arrested in Brazil and the UK in 2022. According to City of London Police at least two of the members were teenagers.
IntelBroker is a Serbian black hat hacker active since October 2022, who has committed several high-profile cyber attacks. Their targets have included Europol, Pandabuy, and Apple, with over 80 sales and leaks of compromised data having been traced to them. They claim to be currently residing in Russia for security reasons.
