14 DAY TRIAL // Just like it did in 2014, when Brazil hosted the Football World Cup, the Anonymous hacker collective has launched threats and then delivered cyber-attacks against Brazil government and sporting agencies for hosting the Rio Olympics in spite of massive public protests against it.
The social issues surrounding the World Cup and the Rio Olympics are well known by now, and we will not get into them, but what you need to be aware of is that a large part of Brazilians did not want their country to host the Olympics.
The reasons are that the events have drained the nation's budget and have created harsh living and economic conditions for people in the country, which is now facing a severe financial crisis.
Anonymous made threats...
That being said, two days ago, two videos appeared on YouTube, one in Portuguese and one in English, announcing upcoming cyber-attacks against the Brazilian government and the organizers of the Rio 2016 Olympics.
The group followed this by posting a list of targets on Anonymous Brazil's Facebook page, asking fellow hackers to target the listed websites, which included the Brazil 2016 portal, the government portal for the state of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian Sports Ministry, the Brazilian Olympic Committee, and the official Rio 2016 Olympics page.
Threatening videos like these had been published before by Anonymous, but not all of them were followed through with actual hacking campaigns.
... and then delivered
This time around, the threats were real, and after the Rio 2016 Olympics had kicked off, the group started dumping databases from several Brazilian sporting federations.
As you can see from the image below, the first batch of dumped databases is from the Brazilian Handball Federation, the Brazilian Boxing Federation, the Brazilian Triathlon Federation, and the Brazilian Modern Pentathlon Federation.
From the contents of the dumped data, these are the databases of the official websites. No other data was included, such as internal documents or sensitive government personnel information. These four databases were dumped yesterday.
Today, the group has come back with a new batch of data dumps, this time belonging to the government portal for the state of Rio de Janeiro, and one from the Brazilian Paralympic Committee.
As with the first batch, only website databases were included, no other information. The last database dumped, from the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, only contained a table of site admins, the database schema, and database connection details. It seems that the group took special care not to dump any details that might affect athletes with disabilities.
As the Olympic Games are just starting and will last for a few weeks, expect more hacks as part of this hacktivism campaign.
"The media sells the illusion that the whole city celebrates and commemorate the reception of tourists from all over the world, many of them attracted by the prostitution network and drugs at a bargain price. This false happiness hides the blood shed in the suburbs of the city, mainly in the favelas thanks to countless police raids and military under the pretext of a fake war," the Anonymous statement reads.
