Local media in Germany is reporting (translate) that hackers have defaced the website of the German Interior Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. On the first page, the website was promoting a link to a site protesting against the new biometric passports and telecommunications data retention legislation.

The new data retention or preservation law, which is supported by Interior Minister Schäuble, obliges commercial Internet service and telephony providers to store extensive phone call or Internet traffic records. In addition, Germany has already introduced the new biometric passports for the Schengen zone required by new EU legislation, even though the deadline to start implementing such documents featuring fingerprint identification is set to June 2009.

After unidentified hackers messed with the minister's website, its front page greeted visitors with a message in capital letters reading "VISIT: ---> Vorratsdatenspeicherung <---" The link directed users to a site protesting against the legislative initiatives of the minister regarding telecommunications data retention.

According to some reports, the website was compromised through a vulnerability in the Typo3 content management system used to power it. The administrators moved fast and took the website offline in order to investigate and close the security breach. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for antivirus vendor Sophos, notes that according to other reports this was a dictionary attack against a weak administrative password. The cracked password was "gewinner" ("winner" in English), the researcher writes.

Protesting against political or social events or developments through hacking is not uncommon. A good example of the so-called "hacktivism" has been noticed during the recent armed conflict in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of websites including those of several Israeli media outlets, the U.S. Army, NATO and even Unicef have been defaced by Palestinian supporters.

Graham Cluley strongly disagrees with this form of protest. "The fact is, of course, that just because it might be easy to hack into a website doesn't make it an acceptable thing to do. Protesters may have valid reasons to fight the laws that governments are trying to bring into place, but turning to the methods used by cybercriminals is not acceptable," the analyst points out.

However, governments, political parties and politicians need to watch out how they handle their online resources or computers, especially now, in times of global economic crisis. In their attempt to stabilize the economy, unpopular decisions are bound to be taken, and this makes them a likely target for people choosing to protest though such actions.