Pierluigi Paganini
February 23, 2016
The Anonymous collective has hacked one of the websites managed by the France’s Ministry of Defense, the CIMD (Centre d’Identification des Materiels de la Defense). The hacktivists accessed the database and leaked it online to protest against the country’s foreign arms trade operations.
Anonymous accuses the French Government of selling weapons to repressive regimes like the Saudi Arabia. The France authorities are also responsible accused by Anonymous of using surveillance and hacking tools, as demonstrated by the documents leaked by Wikileaks following the hack of the surveillance firm Hacking Team.
The incident was disclosed on February 22 by Anonymous, the users were
A “Our web portal will be temporarily unavailable due to maintenance actions” message was displayed to the users of the CIMD portal.
Hackers leaked online the database dump containing sensitive information, including army supplier data and partners information, alongside with login and FTP credentials and PHP sessions.
The archive includes usernames paired with cleartext passwords.
As proof of the hack, Anonymous also leaked the pictures of the CIMD admin panel, experts that visioned the images speculate the web portal was running a dated CMS.
“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.” wrote Catalin Cimpanu in a blog post published by Softpedia.
Anonymous highlighted the presence of a series of press articles in the CIMD archive that report the foreign arms trade operations of the French Government.
Anonymous also shared the link to report published by Amnesty International in 2012 that listed France as the world’s second largest arms trader.
Below the links to the leaked data
(Security Affairs – CIMD, Anonymous)
Hacking / November 23, 2024
