Hacktivism: On the Use of Botnets in Cyberattacks

This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or \u2018hacktivism\u2019 as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism \u2013 the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends \u2013 that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means of botnets \u2013 networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target website without the consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions. Second, Gilbert Simondon\u2019s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination