Hackers hit 6 Trinidad gov’t websites

(Trinidad Guardian) Web­sites be­long­ing to the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the Min­is­ter of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al were among sev­er­al gov­ern­ment web­sites tar­get­ted by Brazil­ian hack­ers Thursday.

Peo­ple at­tempt­ing to vis­it the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and Im­mi­gra­tion web­sites around mid­day were greet­ed with im­ages post­ed by ‘Van­daThe­God’, a Brazil­ian-based cy­ber team that spe­cialis­es in hack­ing web­sites and post­ing po­lit­i­cal mes­sages.

Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young said he was made aware of the hack.

“The Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty’s web­site, as well as Im­mi­gra­tion’s web­site, were hacked. There are cur­rent­ly in­ves­ti­ga­tions with re­spect to where this hack­ing could have tak­en place from and we have shut down the web­site as you would imag­ine un­til we are able to se­cure them and un­der­stand if any­thing has hap­pened,” said Min­is­ter Young dur­ing the Post-Cab­i­net Press Brief­ing.

The min­is­ter said that no crit­i­cal in­for­ma­tion had been com­pro­mised by the at­tack.

“I would like to as­sure the pub­lic that there is no re­al dam­age done. These web­sites don’t get in­to our op­er­at­ing sys­tems, these web­sites are not go­ing to af­fect the records at Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty….cer­tain­ly not the records at im­mi­gra­tion ei­ther. So there is no rea­son for us to be over­ly con­cerned about an in­ten­tion­al at­tack on da­ta that ex­ists in those two very im­por­tant places…Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the di­vi­sion of Im­mi­gra­tion which is a di­vi­sion of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty,” said Min­is­ter Young.

The hack­ers placed a Youtube link to Brazil­ian com­e­dy rock band Ma­monas As­sas­si­nas’s 1995 song Pela­dos em San­tos on the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty web­site.

How­ev­er, af­ter the me­dia brief­ing, more gov­ern­ment web­sites were tar­get­ed.

The web­sites of the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Na­tion­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s web­site were al­so hacked by the group.

Those web­sites, like the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty web­site be­fore, was tak­en of­fline yes­ter­day af­ter­noon.

The words “Join the rev­o­lu­tion, tell your cor­rupt gov­ern­ment to (ex­ple­tive) off” were placed on those pages.

The hack­ers list­ed the van­dalised web­sites on their Twit­ter feed.

That feed al­so lists oth­er web­sites in the Unit­ed States and Brazil which were sim­i­lar­ly hacked re­cent­ly.