Hackers Deface Albania Ministerial Websites

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October 27  

News 29 Jul 14

A previously unknown computer pirates group defaced several official websites on Monday, attacking reforms that allegedly restrict freedom and slating the government for doing too little to fight corruption.

Besar Likmeta
BIRN

Tirana

Anonymous mask | Photo by Luciano Castillo/Flickr

The group called Redanons_al on Monday took over and defaced the web pages of the interior and foreign ministries and those of the ministries of integration, agriculture, energy, welfare, innovation and technology, health and urban development.

The website of the council of ministers and those of the ministry of defence and the minister of state were the only websites that survived the attack.

The group left a political message explaining the reasons for the attacks and listed a number of demands.

“This attack comes at a time when the government and the Prime Minister are trying to concentrate all powers in their hands,” the group wrote on the defaced websites.

“This is unacceptable because Albanians put their trust in this government and the administration should acts like servants of the people and not the other way around,” it added.

The group listed a number of other grievances against the government, including the proposed reform of higher education, which will raise fees in public universities, the planned registration of IMEI codes of mobile handsets, alleged failures to tackle corrupt judges, political attacks on the President’s office and a proposed hike in electricity prices.

The group also called on the Prime Minister and the center-left ruling majority to slash MPs’ wages by 50 per cent and publish data on how the public broadcaster RTSH spends taxpayers’ money. The government was further urged to fire all the staff of the National Agency for Information Technology.

“They are not able to provide security for anything,” the hackers said. “In our online videos anyone can see all the [online] security infrastructure of our government, which should have been a secret but was posted in an unsecure server,” the group added.