Organized criminal hackers

Organized criminal hackers can cost your business money

As far back as the 1960's, there have been Organized criminal hackers dedicated to pushing the limits of online security for sport. Initially, before the age of organized seizures of social media and bank accounts, the term 'hacker' was a relatively benign term used to describe a person with an innocent penchant for computers. In the beginning, the primary concern for an average hacker was simply to make their own personal mark. The laws against digital crime during the advent of hacking were incredibly lax, if enforced at all, and so the early days were more or less the golden days for anyone with an Internet connection and the tools to do mischief.

The legal response to hacking has grown dramatically larger in scale in the current day, and so has the sophistication of hacking techniques. No longer just a time-killing hobby for self-promoting digital rabble rousers, hacking is now the full-time racket, rife with organized groups possessing same level of coordinated industriousness and illicit earning potential as the American inner-city drug cartels of the 50s and 60s.

Of course, not every group is concerned with a concrete goal of financial gain. Some groups, such as 'hacktivists' whose intrusive online exploits are allegedly for the purpose of social reformation. Since achieving mainstream attention in 2003, some hacktivist groups have become infamous for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks specifically targeted websites with government, corporate or religious affiliations.

The Anonymous collective has gained a reputation as the "poster child" for Organized criminal hackers, but they were hardly the last of their kind to emerge in the 2000's. Organizations such as Global kOS, an FBI-investigated hacking group that rose to prominence in 2004 and still operates today, make a game out of harassing webmasters and indiscriminately distributing tools to create denial of service disruptions. The alleged goal of Global kOS was and still is nothing more than spreading as much chaos as possible. The group has more than a dozen affiliated members who have each yet to be identified by any investigators.

The most prominent Organized criminal hackers to launch its campaign in recent months is called OurMine. A self-proclaimed "security group", OurMine has distinguished itself from the likes of notoriously elusive hacking groups by keeping its headquarters in plain sight. The hacking group has established a public Twitter page, from which it announces the most recent popular accounts on YouTube that the team has managed to temporarily commandeer and then subsequently release under the precedent of "testing". The group claims that its goal is merely to expose holes in digital security that would provide a window of opportunity for more aggressive hackers at their skill level, but only time will tell whether or not their controversial, unsolicited methods of "quality control" are truly as altruistic as they claim.