The government of Greece is due to vote on new cuts next week in order to ensure the next installment of a $38.8 billion loan, currently being held back by the Troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras will need to get additional austerity measures past the PASOK Socialists and the Democratic Left. Meanwhile, violent public demonstrations in the streets are increasing, with some suggestions that the far-right political party, the Golden Dawn, has infiltrated the police in order to provoke clashes with the largely left-wing street demonstrators.
It is against this background that Anonymous claims to have hacked into the Ministry of Finance. Files have been uploaded to an Anonymous website, and an announcement placed on Pastebin. The announcement, in English, claims solidarity with the Greek people and quotes statistics on the effect of austerity in Greece. For example, it claims, “More than 439,000 underage children are living below poverty level in Greece due to the ongoing crisis, according to a UNICEF report released on Oct. 16...”
Now, it adds, “We gained full access to the Greek Ministry of Finance. Those funky IBM servers don't look so safe now, do they...” Anonymous claims to have a “sweet 0day SAP exploit”, and the group intends to “sploit the hell out of it.”
This hack, which seems to be genuine, has been done under the banner #OpGreece. Anonymous has breached numerous Greek government sites over the last year, but usually under the banner #OpSolidarityGreece, which lends some weight to the suggestion that this hack was performed more by local hackers than the international collective – or at least a small group within Anonymous. Nevertheless, the leaked documents will be highly embarrassing for the government. At one level, the usernames and passwords dumped by the group are in plain text with a high volume of ‘123456’ passwords, while at another level one leaked document shows a demand for a JPY 900 million interest payment, due by 8 November, to be paid to the Deutsche Bank in Tokyo and London.