AntiSec Hackers Hit in Philippines and Peru

Hackers affiliated with Anonymous and its AntiSec campaign have hacked into the website of Filipino Congress, as well as ten sites operated by the Peruvian government.

Originally launched by LulzSec, Operation Anti-Security (AntiSec) calls for the leaking of confidential data stolen from governmental websites with the purpose of exposing corruption and unethical behavior.

Many websites have been hit in the name of AntiSec so far, including several belonging to US government contractors, however, it seem the campaign is expanding all over the world.

Latin America has became a focus for the hacking operations. First, several Brazilian hacker crews pledged their support to AntiSec and leaked data stolen from several government websites.

Then, last week, Colombian hackers dumped information stolen from the Colombian national police site. Yesterday it was the time for Peruvian hackers to leak data taken from ten governmental and educational websites.

Several hacked sites belong to local administrations, while others to universities and even ministries. The compromise affected the website of the Peruvian Ministry of Education which remains offline at the time of writing this article.

The dumped data includes real names, email addresses, telephone numbers, plaintext passwords and password hashes belonging to government employees or members of academia. The information could serve as a starting point for more targeted attacks.

Giving the fact that attackers obtained access to the underlying databases, we can speculate that the like attack vector used to compromise these websites was SQL injection. SQLi weaknesses are very simple and common, but also very dangerous. They have been exploited in the past to hack into the websites and then networks of banks and other sensitive institutions.

Operation AntiSec is also active in other parts of the world. The governments of Germany, Italy and Zimbabwe have also been targeted by hackers affiliated with the campaign. The website of the Filipino House of Representatives was hacked earlier this week and data extracted from it was leaked.