Hacktivism in its proper form is, in theory easily addressed, according to Sourcefire's Brvenik by not making business decisions that challenge the rights of the people.

"This is never as easy as it sounds. As people we make mistakes and don't always see the downstream impacts of our actions," he says.

In addition to designing internal systems that were easily audited and applying appropriate security controls to customer information and intellectual properties, Brvenik added that some adjustments to corporate culture might be needed.

"Develop a corporate culture that values the customer, values their rights, and strives to find the balance between business and people in an acceptable way."

IDC's Hue warns that because anyone can be a target of hacktivists, the best way of addressing hacktivism is to maintain a high level of security fortitude. "The first thing organisations need to do is to perform a network configuration to block the attack by using intrusion detection and prevention systems [IPS]," he says.