We are still in the stage of these groups being very amateurish. It will take few rounds of purges until really committed+careful+smart organizations emerge.
Committed/careful/smart organizations already exist. But they aren't motivated by publicity and lols. They make serious money through industrial espionage and financial fraud, and they stay as under the radar as possible. Everyone who has a credit or debit card has likely experienced having that information being stolen in one way or another. Those activities aren't just accidents or pranks by bored teens.
Organized crime is well invested in these sorts of things, and for every one incident you hear about there are dozens or hundreds you don't.
Yes they definitely do exist, but I am referring to the ideological types not the straightforward crime for money. Also need to consider the fact that resources brought against Lulsec etc were orders of magnitude more then what normal credit card fraud criminals have to deal with.
Sure they would, they'd just be smarter about it. The point of hacktivism is publicity. If no one knows what you're doing, you're not being particularly effective.
I want to refute your point with the mention of Stuxnet. Please correct me if I'm wrong but up until now there are no groups that have owned up to the virus. There's evidence and much speculation to point it towards Israel gov't but no definitive proof.
A lot of the content that surrounded Stuxnet also hints to further organizations existing behind the veil. There were at a minimum 3 0-day exploits present in the virus that would have to have been operated from behind the scenes. It is extremely unlikely that a single group was able to create such a virus without external resources.
In the end you don't need to issue press releases and the like. You need to get in, do your damage and get out. Let the damage reveal itself in time and its considered massively successful. Those fighting the Iran nuclear program did more while keeping their mouths shut than any loud group ever has.
Stuxnet was cyberwarfare, not hacktivism. The point of Stuxnet was to disable infrastructure, whereas the point of much of what Anon does is to get attention. Now, granted, that doesn't require the ego-driven hacks and braggery that we've seen from them, it simply requires getting in, getting out, and posting the data anonymously then promoting and publicizing the data, not the hackers. I suspect you may start to see more of the hacker cells aligned with anonymous take this approach in the future to minimize the heat that they feel personally.
Great distinction of cyberwarfare and hacktivism ... its unfortunate that both get shown in the same light while they clearly have different motive behind them.
For a group, that would take lots of discipline. Not impossible, but not very likely. Even Feds, Chinese and Israeli "teams" suffer unwanted leaks --and these are trained people. People who go thru psychological profiling, shaping, and get reminded by the bureaucracy probably on a frequent basis.
It's hard for me to imagine a loose-knit group being able to pull this disciple off long-term.
