We report on Anonymous a lot in this memo. That’s the way the hacking group likes it because they can get press coverage to further their causes. Not that we support or oppose their cause but when someone does something like shut down the CIA website, well, that’s news. But I have wondered if the people who deal with computer systems regard Anonymous and other hacktivists as an annoyance or a threat.

Turns out: threat. From Computerworld (a good publication that always sounds like a 1980s computer store to me):
Sixty-four percent of the nearly 2,000 IT professionals who participated in Bit9’s 2012 Cyber Security Survey believe that their companies will suffer a cyberattack during the next six months and sixty-one percent of them chose hacktivists as the likely attackers.

Here’s something kind of surprising: hacktivists were responsible for most of the data theft in cyber attacks in the past year but comprised only 3% of attacks overall. They don’t hit often but when they hit, they hit big.