Defacements and data leaks mark the beginning of Operation Harpoon

Aug 20, 2012 07:36 GMT  ·  By

OpHarpoon, a campaign whose main goal is to “try and stop” whaling, has made ten victims, all from the Faroe Islands. DoktorBass, a supporter of the Anonymous Australia

movement, appears to be the hacker who runs this operation.

The list of victims includes telecoms company Farose Telecom (ft.fo), car dealership Nordcar (nordcar.fo), news site NetAvisin (netavisin.fo), and analytics site VevListin.fo.

The rest of the targeted websites – whose ownerships we couldn’t precisely determine – are lfb.fo, transport.fo, r2net.fo, ras2.fo, sif.fo and ven.fo.

While some of these websites have been defaced, from most of them the hacker leaked sensitive data such as usernames and clear text passwords, including the ones of the administrators.

“We have targeted your community because of the illegal whaling that goes on here. We want it STOPPED. For too long this has gone on, and day after day these poor innocent animals are slain for money and food. It’s a crime against nature to slaughter them in such a way, and it must END,” a message posted on the defaced pages read.

The statement has been published on all the defaced pages in English and Icelandic. The hacktivist claims that this is only the first stage of the operation and that there is more to come.

At press time, the affected site’s webmasters appeared to be in the process of removing the HTML pages added by the hacker.

For those who don’t remember DoktorBass, he is the hacker who back in July breached the site of the Women’s Land Link Africa (wllaweb.org) and then felt sorry for doing so.

“Right. I've made a mistake obviously. I feel very guilty now about dumping that site, I shouldn't have done it. It was a site promoting women's rights in Africa for [expletive]’s sake. I'm meant to be supporting that,” he said at the time.