ROYAL OAK – Cybersecurity expert Dan Lohrmann talks about the cyber year in review and what’s likely to happen in 2017. He said 2016 was the year when hacktivism stole the show.

Lohrmann said the new movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is well-timed — epitomizing outsiders banding together to bring down the powerful enemies against long odds to steal confidential plans. This plot reminds me of hacktivist agendas over the past year.

Any summary of 2016 must start by recognizing that a global anti-establishment mood brought upsets that defied “expert” predictions — both offline and online. The surprising Brexit vote, Donald Trump’s shocking election victory and Italy’s “no” vote in a referendum on constitutional reform are a few of the noteworthy examples of how this “anti” trend shocked the world in successive major events led by populist uprisings.

And online, activist hackers, often called hacktivists engaged in a long list of different acts of hacktivism — even prior to the election, took center stage in supporting (or opposing) a vast array of causes that range from anti-Wall Street to anti-free trade to anti-corruption to anti-fill-in-the-blank. This is not just about distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, but stealing data in a variety of ways — for their causes.  

To read Lohrmann’s column, click on https://mitechnews.com/cyber-defense/2016-year-hackers-stole-show-cause/

To listen to Lohrmann describe the 2017 threats, click on https://soundcloud.com/podcastdetroit/m2episode-63-dan-lorhmann-security