Hackers Broke Into Syria's Secret Police Computers And Found... Porn

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasperhamill/2013/11/20/hackers-broke-into-syrias-secret-police-computers-and-found-porn/

By Jasper Hamill
Forbes.com
11/20/2013

An exiled Syrian hacker has claimed to have cracked the systems of the 
country’s brutal secret police to find evidence that intelligence officers 
spent their working days watching pornography.

The computer expert was a leading member of a youth wing of the Syrian 
opposition, and fled to Europe in fear of his life after several of his 
colleagues were arrested by the Mukhabarat, Syria’s feared intelligence 
agency. The Syrian conflict has become increasingly bloody this year, with 
a number of chemical weapons atrocities and vicious attacks on civilians. 
It has also featured many cyber assaults, such as the global actions of 
hacking groups like the Syrian Electronic Army.


Before leaving his home country last year, the Syrian hacktivist and his 
colleagues had been probing the systems used by spies to snoop on the 
population of Syria. They found not only found records of millions of 
online communications, but also details of hard-core pornography watched 
by the secret police, which is known for its sadism and brutality.

“It was easy to look at the secret police’s systems, which were left wide 
open to public view. The information they held was scary,” our Syrian 
source said. “But despite the amount of data kept on the Mukhabarat 
systems, the security was extremely lax and unsophisticated. We were able 
to observe the different pornographic habits of each of the agents’ bases, 
as well as records of the web traffic of much of the Syrian population. 
What we found was that agents would watch pornography whilst at work.”

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