While 2011 wasn’t the beginning of hacktivism, it was when the global media caught fire with attention for the phenomenon—and, according to a report [PDF link] released by American mobile company Verizon, 2011 is also the year that security breaches and data losses due to hactivism surpassed those from actual criminal enterprise. Last year’s cybercrime statistics show that more than half of the 855 recorded incidents represented hacktivist style attacks.

The Rise of the Hacktivist [Infographic] indeed.

Out of all the targets 79% were targets of opportunity and 96% were not complicated or extremely difficult in nature and this is revealed to be the case because 97% of the breaches could have been prevented with simple or intermediate fixes. For example, a multitude of the breaches seen in 2011 were caused by unpatched servers, thoughtless firewall rules, and generally leaving the cyber-bathroom window open while securing the front door.

As a result, the broad body of hactivists proved to be better infiltrators because of their disinterest in their own anonymity and their sheer numbers, making them like a colony of ants crawling over a house: eventually one will find a way in and then in comes the army.

“The most significant change we saw in 2011 was the rise of ‘hacktivism’ against larger organizations worldwide,” the report explained, speaking about the rising numbers of data losses to hactivist activity. “The frequency and regularity of cases tied to activist groups that came through our doors in 2011 exceeded the number worked in all previous years combined .but this was not restricted to our caseload alone; the other organizations participating in this report also spent a great deal of effort responding to, investigating, and prosecuting hacktivist exploits . It was extremely interesting to piece these different perspectives together to form a global view of investigations into activist groups and their victims .”

To make things worse, in 85% of cases it took weeks or more to discover that the breach had occurred—potentially meaning that the exploit persisted even after the attack—and 92% of the incidents were discovered by a 3^rd party. It suggests that most of the victims had no comprehensive security management in place to deal with server maintenance or intrusion detection. This fits with the expectation that many of them were the low hanging fruit of the pool.

The Verizon report lists amid their conduct mythology that they interviewed victim corporations and IT Departments to determine how they responded to threats, what data was uncovered, and how the threats uncovered themselves. They also expanded their data capture to speaking with law enforcement officials in the US, EU, Australia, Holland, and Ireland. Their report covered 855 incidents and an estimated 174 million stolen records.

Amid them they probably came across the exploits of Anonymous, AntiSec, and LulzSec, as well as the hacks that struck the PlayStation Network—bringing it down for nearly a month—and Sony, against RSA SecurID (an actual criminal enterprise), Lockheed Martin, Northop Grumman, and potentially even NASA.

Other interesting findings show that the use of malware (Trojans, worms, viruses, and spybots) have been on the rise, and we can certainly see that as true. With ZeuS, Stuxnet, and Duqu making the rounds alongside other malware tricks moving to take advantage of the mobile scene, the year 2012 may see malware unseat the hands-on hactivist as the primary cyberthreat.