Ecuadorean President Correa claims attacks on his private computers and accounts

Ecuadorean President Correa has publicly denounced the US Intelligence continuous cyber attacks against his private internet accounts and computers.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has publicly denounced the US Intelligence of “systematic, high-tech” cyber attacks on his private internet accounts and computers.

The President Rafael Correa also revealed that the last attack occurred  on Thursday, November 20th, was traced back to US servers. The President Correa made the revelation via Twitter and later through the Latin American press.

President Correa informed the press that he sees “systematic, high-tech and high-resource attacks,”adding that “they will not succeed, we are more, so many more.”

The President Correa remarked that foreign hackers backed by US Intelligence daily hit his private systems trying to hack them

“On Thursday, all day I received attacks… that come from abroad and trace back to a server in the United States, targeting my bills, trying to hack my information, turn on microphones, listen in on our conversations,” Correa said in his weekly Citizen Link no.399.

President Correa has publicly criticized the US surveillance program in different occasions, don’t forget that its country is providing support to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange giving him asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy indefinitely. The Ecuadorian President Correa has also evaluated the opportunity to provide asylum to Edward Snowden.

The President Correa has already denounced similar cyber attacks defining the offensive as the work of “unscrupulous domestic opponents.”  In October similar incidents were detected by the President’s staff, which attributed the hacking campaign to the Colombia. The president ordered to national Defence to improve its cyber capabilities and to secure national systems and protect official communications with the use of encryption.

The Ecuadorean Government has promoted the creation of a dedicated cyber defense department this summer.

The attacks hypothesized by the President Correa are plausible if we consider the revelations made by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that in different documents refers of an intense activity of the NSA in the surveillance of exponents of foreign government thanks to sophisticated hacking platforms like the FoxAcid servers.

There is another circumstance that increases truth of President’s statements, the ANDES news agency reports that 99 percent of the Latin American state’s internal and external communication are routed through infrastructure housed in the US.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Ecuador, President Correa)