UPDATED 15:51 EDT / FEBRUARY 10 2012

NEWS

Syrian Officials Discover When They Choose Bad Passwords, Anonymous Will Get In

As a democratizing agent, the Internet gives access to a multitude of people to a multitude of targets and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s office discovered recently that extremely poor Internet security acts like cracks in the dyke—the Internet will get in. On Monday, the hactivist collective Anonymous breached the security on the office’s e-mails and then leaked hundreds of them into cyberspace.

According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, included amid the e-mails offered happened to be a memo prepping Assad for his December 2011 interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters.

Hactivist collectives like Anonymous represent a myriad supply of bored people who are constantly poking at likely and unlikely targets; some of them use tools that automatically scan for vulnerabilities in web sites. And then there are those who just exist to jiggle the lock:

The attack took place overnight Sunday and the target was the mail server of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs. Some 78 inboxes of Assad’s aides and advisers were hacked and the password that some used was “12345”. Among those whose email was exposed were the Minister of Presidential Affairs Mansour Fadlallah Azzam and Assad’s media adviser, Bouthaina Shaaban.

A high profile account or e-mail address that keeps a password like “12345” or “password” is just waiting to get broken into. In fact, it’s such a poor password that we only need to look to the 1987 Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs to see it joked about as a bad combination to put on someone’s luggage. If people knew that this was a bad password before the Internet became the popular force it was today, we hope that people would acknowledge it now.

It’s like leaving the front door to a sensitive building unlocked (or locked with a deadbolt that doesn’t work more like.) Chances are good that the IT department that oversaw these accounts probably repeatedly warned the officials to change their passwords.

To date, Anonymous has been well known for attacking restrictive, censorious, and tyrannical regimes with DDoS attacks and data leaks. In the past, Anonymous has struck Turkey for filtering communication and silencing journalists and they’ve targeted Malaysia over blocking sites like The Pirate Bay and others from their citizens.

Syria themselves has been subject to previous website vandalism, political dissent, and criticism by Anonymous for the activity of Syria’s Ministry of Defense.

As random unknowns all over the Internet look to help resolve moral quandaries around the world, Anonymous is becoming more than just a thorn in the side of international diplomacy: it’s making it obvious that politicians and their staff need to think more clearly about their security hygiene.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU