Anonymous has been involved in a campaign called #OpMonsanto which was launched against the global biotech company.  On Wednesday, Anonymous laid claim to have disabled Monsanto’s website.  The website appeared to have been affected for some time late in the evening.  Protests have erupted worldwide against the company, and reports have the numbers at over two million protesters around the world in hundreds of cities earlier this week.  At issue is Monsanto’s use of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) foods.  The rallies called for further scientific research of their effects and the labeling of all foods that contain the controversial ingredients.

The incident continues the issues-focused “hacktivism” that is the hallmark of Anonymous.  Monsanto is but one of the causes where Anonymous has gotten involved in recent months.  The mission is a far cry from what the general public actually thinks Anonymous is.  Certainly there are elements that are looking for general chaos and conquests, but for the most part, the largest operations – the core of Anonymous appears to gravitate and focus on the social, political, and economic issues of the day.  A couple of years ago, the questions that usually came up surrounding hacktivism were around what a company can do to protect themselves.  That era was quite different, it was the early days of Anonymous and we had the likes of LulzSec and others that merely went after any target that brought them notoriety.  The response then of course is the same as it was then, evaluate your likelihood of being a target, execute due diligence, assess your security, raise your security posture, create a contingency plan and plan, plan, plan. Today’s biggest threats come from sources like cyber-espionage, phishing, malware, and the loss of data that comes with it.  Sometimes it’s state-sponsored, sometimes they are crimes of opportunity, and sometimes the threat comes from within.

As I recently stated, the game has shifted from prevention to damage control.  In other words, we’ve gone as far as we could trying to keep people out of our networks – people are still getting in.  This should hardly be a surprise, as the variety of endpoints and vectors that make up the enterprise nowadays are staggering and an endless spectrum of threats go along with features like mobile apps, file storage, and more.  The next layer of security uses the knowledge of what users typically access, when they access it and where they do it from.  In other words, the awareness of standard behaviors make up the complete security complex.  It’s a transformation enabled by real-time analytics and big data, by better policies, by better procedures, and by better training.  So while we could spend our days reporting what site got hacked and by whom over and over again, we take these opportunities to state that security is as important as any element in the enterprise IT landscape.  Security standards are evolving, getting better and moving towards meeting these continual challenges.  The likes of Anonymous are a phenomenon that isn’t likely to just fade away, and the visible threat they present keeps many companies on their game.