“Hactivism” is a movement defined by the Verizon (News - Alert) 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report as “cyberhacking to advance political and social objectives.” The press release describes the rise of hactivism as “dramatic.”

I concur. This year alone, I have written reports about impassioned hackers protesting the Olympics coming to Chicago, the “Evil Shadows Team” in China that shut down an Indian Microsoft (News - Alert) store over the China/ Pakistan border dispute and “goingdark” protests in Poland for the sake of anti-censorship. The study conducted by Verizon reveals that last year, 58 percent of stolen entities from hackers, were not stolen out of greed. Rather, hactivism.

Whether the cause was to make a point about tightening security or for anti-bullying, the statistics for last year’s hack-attacks are astounding. The report shows that the majority of attacks were avoidable (97 percent) and not very difficult to execute (96 percent).

Additionally, hacking was a more popular method for data breaches and lost data over malware— although malware is also on the rise and constituted 95 percent of compromised records. Curiously, 70 percent of all hacking crimes have been traced to Eastern Europe.  Below is an excerpt from an interesting interview between Softpedia and an anonymous Eastern European who by all accounts, seems like a hactivist.

Softpedia: So you contact administrators to let them know that their sites are vulnerable?

SEPO: Yes, most of time I contact the administrators to tell them about vulns. Sometime they respond to me, some of them ask for a little help. It's cool when you can use your knowledge to help someone.

Softpedia: When did you start to hack, and why? Did you ever hack just for the fun of it or was it always for a purpose?

SEPO: Until 2009 I was hacking only emails and ICQ accounts. Then I discovered a tutorial for SQL Injection and I started to learn PHP and MySQL. This method has become my favorite, and then goes XSS and social engineering.When I was hacking emails and ICQ accounts it was just for fun, but after a little time I found that a lot of hackers are making good money for this. I tried to make some money and it was pretty nice after I was paid with $700 for a big list of emails. It took me several weeks, but the result was a good one.Now it’s hacktivism, only targeting governments and corrupted companies, universities and others.