Cyber Attack on FinMin Leaks Classified Documents on Greek Economy

Posted by keeptalkinggreece in Economy, Tech

A cyber attack on servers of Greek Finance Ministry has been claimed by hacker group Anonymous on Sunday evening. Classified documents and correspondence between the Finance Ministry and its international lenders have been leaked, in what it seems “one of the biggest hacker attacks”.
The hackers reportedly gained access to an unknown number of documents, e-mails and correspondence between the Ministry and the Troika representatives about the state of Greek economy, to many usernames and passwords. It is not known whether personal data of taxpayers have also been accessed.
Here is to note, that hackers had attacked the website of the Finance Ministry also in April 2012. The fact raises a lot of questions about the security of the FinMin website as well as about the low-security level of passwords, some being as just <12345>.
According to Greek website secnews.gr that reported the cyber attack, “the leaked documents are referring to the period between June 2012 and October 22, 2012.”

The attackers claim that they wanted to expose the date on the state of Greek economy so that all Greeks know the truth and thus just days before the 13.5-billion-euro austerity package goes to Parliament for voting.
“Hyperlinks have been uploaded on Anonymous website Anonpaste linking directly to the leaked documents,” writes secnews.gr that also publishes some of the leaked documents however with a sharp censorship for obvious reasons. SecNews.gr writes, it was informed about the cyber attack by one of its forum users.
Latest post on Secnews.gr claims that the cyber attack was possibly not executed by the Anonymous group but by some “organized network” that forwarded to them the stolen documents.
Secnews.gr, a website specialized on IT security news, reports among other that no Anonymous-members from Greece participated in the attack. The site is in Greek but the leaked uploads in English.
There has been no official confirmation of the attack, so far and hardly coverage by mainstream media.
However, popular daily newspaper ETHNOS, posted this morning the Anonymous message and wrote: “Hackers tried to misappropriate data of the General Secretariat of Fiscal Policy and particular files of  Treasury and Budget. The extent of theft is still under investigation.”
See also: Protothema, Zougla.gr and others