14 DAY TRIAL // A group of hackers has broken into a system belonging to German customs officials and stole data related to a GPS tracking system used by the country's federal police.
The group responsible for the attack calls itself n0-N4m3 Cr3w (no-name crew) and according to The H Security, it is politically motivated.
"This constant monitoring can no longer be tolerated. You have violated numerous privacy rights and data protection laws.
"Starting now, every vulnerability will be shamelessly exploited, and we will leak everything we get our hands on in order to cause the greatest damage to the image of the enemies of freedom," the hackers wrote on their website.
"As long as the government and large corporations steal from, lie to, and spy on citizens and have nothing better to do than think about how they can expand their power and pile up even more money, we will continue to work to protect the rights of citizens in this country," they added.
The leaked online by the group is related to the PATRAS tracking system used by German Federal Police, and included usernames, passwords, phone numbers, license plate numbers, locations, and geographical coordinates.
The Federal Police confirmed the legitimacy of the data, but noted that it did not correspond to any of its active investigations. They also revealed that the compromised server belongs to customs officials.
"An analysis conducted by our executive committee revealed that no investigation data used by the Federal Police (or by the Federal Criminal Police Office) was published," a spokesperson said.
"As far as we can tell at the moment, the data published came from a server used by customs officials, which apparently also contained information from the Federal Police on the use of the PATRAS tracking system for distribution among customs officials," they added.
There is currently no evidence that n0-N4m3 Cr3w is linked to Anonymous, the notorious hacktivist collective that is current involved in a campaign to hack into governmental systems and leak sensitive data.