14 DAY TRIAL // There’s a French proverb that says, “A sin confessed is half forgiven.” This is most likely what a hacker called DoktorBass was thinking when he wrote a formal apology after hacking the website of the Women’s Land Link Africa (wllaweb.org), an organization whose purpose is to improve women’s housing and land rights in Africa.
On July 19, Cyber War News reported that DoktorBass, a hacker affiliated with Anonymous Australia, leaked over 50,000 email addresses, usernames and associated password hashes from the websites of the women’s rights group.
“[Expletive] enjoy. To dump the entire database would require me to leave my computer running for over a week straight, so this is simply a small portion of it.THIS IS NOT AN ANONYMOUS ATTACK, it is simply cyber-crime. Don’t complain to me about it,” he wrote next to the leak.
However, a few hours later he had a change of heart.
“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.
“I'm not sure what I was thinking but I can truthfully say I’m a [expletive]. Young and stupid,” he added.
The hacker now urges everyone to stop downloading the file. He asks those who’ve already downloaded it to “delete it immediately.”
“God have mercy upon me,” he concluded.
Unfortunately, the data dump is still available online and we highly doubt the fact that spammers and other cybercriminals will not put the list to good use just because the hacker asked nicely.
So, if a sin confessed is half forgiven, in this case we’ll call it “a sin confessed is a quarter forgiven.”