Organisations advocating for racial justice and civil liberties, including Black Lives Matter (BLM), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are coming under frequent and sustained cyber-attack by undisclosed groups, according to statistics gathered by network protection service Cloudflare. As protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers on 25 May 2020 spread around the US and the world, Cloudflare said it had seen increasing levels of cyber attacks against organisations fighting racism – numbering in the tens of billions – compared with the corresponding week in April.
The attacks on civil rights groups online are a sobering reminder that while the internet can be a tool for change, it can also be used by those that cling to their racist beliefs and work to undermine the good works of the NAACP and other civil rights groups. As someone who grew up in the 1960s, I witnessed first hand the expansion of the civil rights movement, and I know how vital these groups can be to our society.
It’s terrible to see criminals targeting social organisations but whether or not these attacks are racially motivated, data shows that in general cyber-attacks are opportunistic. We’ve seen this same trend with COVID-19 as hackers take advantage of a distracted, remote, and overwhelmed workforce. Any organisation or industry that finds itself in a state of rapid change or getting a lot of media attention should take a moment to make sure they have basic security measures in place to protect their data and operations. They could easily become a target for attack.