Dr. Richard Browne:

In theory, yes. "Hacktivism" is a portmanteau of "hacker" and "activism". We can go back 20 years and more to groups like Anonymous. These groups were random, often anarchic, online collectives and individuals who conducted destructive or nuisance-type attacks for political gain. Very often, it was just to make a name for themselves and sometimes it was with other political motives in mind. One of the things that has been characteristic of European experience in the past 18 to 24 months but particularly in the past 12 months has been the rise of much more orchestrated hacktivist groups that are clearly focused and have set targets. They operate much more advanced tooling than they did previously and are becoming much more effective. It is important not to overstate the effectiveness of what they are doing. I apologise for the jargon, but it is mostly to do with distributed denial-of-service attacks. They point a huge volume of traffic at a website, hoping that it will fall over and, in turn, that will draw attention to the political cause. In many cases, the hacktivist groups we are talking about are pro-Russia. They include groups like NoName and a series of others, which I will not go into. On a European basis, it is possible to track the targeting of individual sectors by groups. For example, a group might go after ports in eight or ten European countries over the course of a week. They will publish on a website that they are going after port facilities in certain countries. Ireland might be included on that list. They do that and then move on. It may never come to the attention of the public that this has happened but they are trying continuously to do this. It is important to note that colleagues in the Baltic states and elsewhere have seen a huge number of these incidents. We have seen some, but nowhere near the same level.