Hacktivism. Will it evolve?

This story in the Hindustan Times should give one reason to pause. It relates wide spread attacks against Indian computing including hundreds of webservers at .in domains. Similar to the so called Chinese Hacker Wars of May, 2001.

In particular:

In the last week of November, international hackers defaced some 230 Indian sites -having domain names ending with .in. A week later more than 1000 Linux based web servers were hacked ain a single attack by international hackers. Over 250 of these servers were located in India.

What I am looking for is evidence that these mostly Pakistani attacks against rival India are first successful and secondly become precursors to more serious information gathering attacks.

Threats evolve when they are spurred by success. So, when the first pimply faced kid scored a major outage of the Internet by releasing a virus or worm that led to hundreds of copycat crimes. When spamming and adware became profitable ventures those types of attacks exploded.

When information warfare delivers an advantage in real terms to one faction waging a war of ideas or ideals then watch out for a wave of cyber attacks that will swamp the meager levees we have in place today.