While the democracy protests in Hong Kong continue, hackers have been hard at work. Members of the hacker collective Anonymous say they have 51 databases from Chinese government websites, which they plan to leak Saturday.
“We want China to stop oppressing Hong Kong and all of it’s citizens with their government,” said one of the hackers, known as F3AR.
“We stand in full solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters, and will continue to hack, leak, and take down all cn and hk government sites until the protesters get what they want,” F3AR said.
The hackers began Operation Hong Kong around Oct. 3. In an Oct. 5 announcement, Anonymous claimed they had already obtained “countless numbers of personal information” (sic) from Chinese government websites. They said they would release the website databases “once we’re done using your login credentials.”
F3AR said he could not detail the contents of all the databases, since different hackers are working on different databases. He said, however, that some contain usernames and passwords, as well as website code.
“But someone else is getting a db [database] of not only regular logins, admin logins that will allow us to deface the site, I believe, as well as usernames and passwords,” he added.
Alongside the database leaks, Anonymous announced they will also be hitting Chinese government websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to overload website and bring them offline, and will be launching a Twitter storm—basically posting a large number of tweets—while the leaks and cyberattacks take place.
sorry for the confusion about the number of Gov.cn DB’s we will be releasing tomorrow. The count is 1.2.3.4...51 dbs total atm #OpHongKong
— Ҭ®€z (@trezsec) October 10, 2014