Fine Gael, hacking and Anonymous
On January 9, the website of Fine Gael, an Irish political party was hacked and the identities of 2,000 subscribers to the site were exposed. The party is in opposition in the Irish parliament and has been for the past 13 or so years. From an agenda standpoint, Fine Gael espouses a type of conservativism that is similar to that of German prime minister Angela Merkel’s party.
Party members had been implicated in local government corruption by the Mahon tribunal, but other parties also have had corruption issues. Which makes me wonder why their site was hacked?
The second thing that struck me was the announcement that Fine Gael put on their site:
- The description of the site being professionally hacked implies work done for financial gain rather than script kiddies
- The claim that the activity was done by Anonymous. Anonymous is as much an idea as anything else and there is no reason why it would select Fine Gael; especially given regulations against P2P networks and other methods of file-sharing by the current Irish government – which would surely be a better target?
- Whilst the Fine Gael notice claims that they are victims like Amazon and Mastercard, the nature of those attacks seems to be fundamentally different in nature to the Fine Gael attack