Another government website fails to protect its assets

Dec 19, 2011 09:48 GMT  ·  By

The official website of the Italian Minister for Public Administration and Innovation (qualitapa.gov.it ) was breached after a hacker discovered an SQL injection vulnerability on one of the pages of their site.

A hacker named Thorwed seems to be responsible for the breach that left 9,000 individuals exposed, reports CyberWarNews.

Usernames, passwords, most of which in clear text, and email addresses were posted in a Pastebin file as a result of the operation.

The cybercriminal’s posts and his Twitter profile give no clues to the reasons why the site was hacked, but judging by his social media description “Hopping to do better” (translation from Spanish), he probably wanted to show, like many others, that the majority of government websites are flawed.

This is not the first time when the Italian government is targeted, not long ago hackers managing to leak sensitive information from official police websites.