Cybercriminals have targeted government sites and released login credentials of over 40,000 accounts. These were used in several government portals. These stolen credentials belong to government sites to state-level agencies.
Head of Group-IB’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IB) Alexandr Kalinin said, the stolen data includes usernames and passwords in plain text. This data was found over online and belonged to many government agencies across 30 countries.
Kalinin said to SC Magazine “The scale and simplicity of government employees’ data compromise show that users, due to their carelessness and lack of reliable cyber defense, fall victims to hackers”.
More than half of the stolen accounts belongs to Italian government officials. This is around 52 percent of the total. This is followed by the accounts belonging to the Saudi Arabian government and the Portuguese government (5 percent).
The hackers also targeted websites for state-agencies belonging to the Italian Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania, the Ministry of Finance of Georgia, the Israeli Defense Force, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy.
The government portals compromised in the hack includes the ‘gov.pl’, ‘gov.ro’, ‘admin.ch’ and ‘government.bg’.
