14 DAY TRIAL // Anonymous hackers hacked into one of the Web portals managed by France's Ministry of Defense, leaking the site's database as a way to protest against the country's intensive foreign arms trade operations.
The incident has been revealed today, February 22, by Anonymous hackers, and targeted one of the Ministry's smaller sites, the CIMD (Centre d'Identification des Materiels de la Defense) portal.
Hours after Anonymous' revelation, the website was brought down, and its users are now greeted by a message that reads, "Our web portal will be temporarily unavailable due to maintenance actions."
Anonymous hackers leak database, gain admin panel access
Hackers leaked the site's database, which contained sensitive information such as information on army suppliers and partners, FTP client usernames, website accounts, and PHP sessions.
Expect some server usernames that included cleartext passwords, but most of the data was not sensitive in nature. We do reserve the right to be wrong, since French is not our strong language, and we might have misinterpreted some of the table headers.
Besides the database dump, hackers provided screenshots of the site's admin panel. As a side note, after testing the vast majority of CMSs listed in Softpedia's Webscripts section, I can say that the army's portal looks like a very old content management platform, if not one custom made just for France's Ministry of Defense.
It should be to no surprise if the hackers found it very easy to breach into the portal's backend, since as time goes by, most CMSs gather security vulnerabilities in droves.
Anonymous wants to protest against France's international arms trade
To justify their attack, Anonymous members pointed viewers that accessed the data dump to a series of press articles regarding France's weapons industry and its lucrative arms trade sector.
One of the links left behind by the hackers pointed to an Amnesty International 2012 article that listed France as the world's second largest arms trader.
The group has also noted that France is selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most repressive regimes, and that France bought spying and surveillance tools from Italian firm The Hacking Team.
