Two of the hackers involved reveal details about the operations taking place in Brazil

Jan 26, 2012 12:05 GMT  ·  By

In the past few days the Brazilian government and its institutions were highly targeted by hacktivists as part of different operations that were launched for diverse reasons. Since there were so many ops and so many sites were being defaced and hit with distributed denial of service attacks, we’ve decided to go down to the pits (IRC channels) to find out more.

Wanting to sort out all the operations, we contacted two of the most active hackers. One of them is Havittaja, an independent hacker that “supports Anonymous anytime they request,” and the other one is S3rver.exe, the one who not long ago breached the website of Sony Pictures proving them vulnerable once again.

One of the main operations is Operation Brasilia, mainly run by Anonymous Brazil, but also benefitting from the support of other independent hackers who share the same beliefs.

As part of this op, the hackers defaced more than 100 commercial and government sites to reveal their protest messages against the government.

“We launched many DDOS attacks and defaced Brazilian sites because of the corruption in the capital of the country,” said Havittaja.

After they took down the major portal brasil.gov.br, SERPRO, a company under the Ministry of Finance, made some declarations that displeased the hackers.

“We also sent a DDoS attack on SERPRO due to untrue declarations about the attack on the portal brasil.gov,” he added.

The second operation, called OpPinheirinho, was launched as a protest against the fact that Police in Brazil evicted 6,000 residents of Pinheirinho, an illegal settlement in the state of São Paulo.

As part of OpPinheirinho, hackers DDOSed almost all the websites hosted on the state of São Paulo government domain, making them inaccessible to visitors.

“We are carrying out attacks on the portals of the city of Sao Paulo, due to the aggressiveness which occurred,” Havittaja explained.

The final op, OpParaiba, according to the hacktivist, represents a “raid on Paraiba due to the mass layoffs that occurred, almost 30 000 doctors.”

On the other hand, S3rver.exe isn’t officially taking part in the operations, but he’s lending a hand in support for the cause, launching DDoS attacks against targets, defacing them, and publishing sensitive data obtained from their servers.

“Anonymous has been the spark of revolutions, the light that guided the protesters and the airforce of the occupy movement,” S3rver.exe revealed.

“They used to be just a petty little group of pranksters but have recently become a representative of free speech. It’s very possible that the most powerful people in the world are a large ‘movement’ of leaderless people. Anonymous is strong because ideas are bulletproof.”