Hacktivism
The Story of the Little Hacktivist
Lately we’ve been talking quite a lot about hacktivism on my YouTube channel, picking up on the interviews that the great Rafa L. did with pro-Russian groups such as NoName057(16), Z Pentest Alliance and User_Sec.
But is all hacktivism the same?
Come with me and let’s look at this short but interesting story.
It so happened that one day the little hacktivist was going through his inbox and came across an interesting email…
Suspicious email
It was clearly phishing: there was no way Correos, the Spanish postal service, was going to send an email from a German domain that had nothing to do with them.
He tells me he followed the link in the email out of sheer curiosity and found, sure enough, a page built to steal the credit card details of any poor unsuspecting souls who fell for the scam.
Scams that, sadly, are getting more common by the day.
Your typical phishing site…
He also tells me it was a website in a faraway Asian country, and it looked for all the world as though the cybercriminals had exploited some vulnerability in a WordPress install sitting in the web root.
Out of healthy curiosity, he decided to do a little reconnaissance of the hacked site…
A beast of a little recon…
And this little hacktivist goes on to tell me that, visiting whatever came back with a 200 OK, he found the following…
The cybercriminal’s webshell
He had found the attacker’s webshell, and from there he could see the whole scam site they had set up… It seems even the bad guys have security holes…
Personally, I get the feeling the criminal in this case couldn’t have cared less about any of it; he must be sick to death of planting things like this all over the world…
And what did our good Little Hacktivist come up with?
He renamed index.php to indox.php, so that anyone who fell for the phishing wouldn’t land on a page asking for their details, but on one listing all the files.
He tells me he didn’t delete anything, because he was afraid that at some point, after a forensic investigation, he might be told he was to blame for some deletion on the server and be held to account…
File listing…
I’m keeping things as anonymous as I can in the screenshots because, even though what our little hacktivist did may look like a good deed, it’s not something you’re allowed to do.
Like it or not, hacking back, an eye for an eye, is not a legal option.
These days there are hacktivists who do exactly what the hero of today’s story did, but there are also people who search for missing persons using OSINT, who track down paedophiles and report them to the police, a thousand different ways to help society legally with your skills.
And today I’d like to take the opportunity to shine a light on all these people fighting for a better world.
And what do you think of this kind of action?
Originally published on LinkedIn on 13 April 2025.
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