All hacktivists should be treated as if they are malicious hackers because the distance between hacking/activism, malevolence, and damage has become too small and too vague.
In legal terms, hacking is fundamentally the circumvention of system controls to obtain unauthorized access to that or another system. There are three basic types of hacker: malicious, ethical, and hacktivist.
Where does this leave the hacktivist? The word derives from hacking (illegal under CFAA) and activism (a term often associated with a desire to effect change for the better via civil disobedience). It combines the concepts of illegal actions and good intention, it usually results in at least some damage - and has always been a problem area for both public opinion and legal consequences.
All things in cyber evolve quickly; and in times of heightened geopolitical tensions, they evolve very rapidly. Hacktivism is evolving. It is important for both the law and cyber defenders to understand the current and potential activity of hacktivism to better understand how it should be treated.
There is no legal definition of hacktivism in the US. However, in a paper (Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy) presented to the World Affairs Council in 1999, Dorothy Denning described hacktivism as "the convergence of hacking with activism, where 'hacking' is used here to refer to operations that exploit computers in ways that are unusual and often illegal, typically for political ends."
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