The future of warfare is information warfare, in fact in modern war the power of information dominance outweighs kinetic outcomes. In this new world, non-state hacker groups can play a key role - be it SEA, QCF, RedHack, etc. Hacker groups operate in networks and to disrupt these networks we need to understand and characterize them. Interestingly, the web balances being the platform to create attacks for these groups and being the source of information to prevent attacks. Hacker groups leave traces.
Some are intentional, announcing future operations, some are non-intentional. The web/internet provides a remarkable arena to collect and organize data on these actors - ranging from their identity, associations, affiliations, objectives, intentions, and technical traces. We will characterize a large set of hacker groups and use a series of analytic techniques to so - network analysis, temporal finger printing, intention mapping, source analysis, temporal overlaps/pattern matching, clustering of operations/groups/intentions, target analysis, as well as geopolitical context analysis.