Supporters of the hacktivist group Anonymous raided the website of Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe for a second time on Nov. 13, leaking several hundred documents, including many marked as classified.
According to a statement by the group, the
raid is a response to what it calls the failure of the OSCE to protect
Ukrainian democracy.
“The OSCE
mission was to protect the elections and report evidence of massive
falsifications and violations, but they failed to do so by issuing statements
that the elections did go the right way with minimum violations. We cannot
tolerate mass murder of Ukraine democracy and we do not tolerate Russian
pressure on OSCE with intend to cover up the violations of election
procedures,” the statement said.
In the run-up to Ukraine’s Oct. 28
parliamentary election, the OSCE carried out a record observation mission,
which resulted in what most others saw as a harsh report – condemning the vote
as a step away from democracy. The report did, however, praise a relatively
peaceful and clean Election Day.
Frane Maroevic, deputy head of OSCE’s communications
office in Vienna, told the Kyiv Post in an email response for this story that
“OSCE website was never hacked [but rather] some content of an e-mail was
published.”
“We
condemn any illegal publication of confidential documents and will not comment
on any such material,” Maroevic said.
The initial web-based attack on Nov. 5
leveraged almost 1,000 documents, and when the leak detected by OSCE, they
quickly shut down their Vienna-based servers. But it was already too late. The
group leaked further documents on Nov. 13, when OSCE refused to comment on the
allegations and recognize the attack.
“…since the
Almighty OSCE wants to play dumb: today we present the second dump called
AFTERMATH – this leak includes sensitive documents after the breach was made
public, indicating ignorance and incapability to respond to such incidents,”
the attackers said in a new statement, also pointing out the OSCE’s involvement
in training anti-cybercrime forces in Ukraine.
The raid
was a further embarrassment to OSCE since they were hosting a meeting on cybercrime
prevention the same day the additional round of documents were leaked and the
second attack was launched.
“You did
nothing to combat cyber hackers in this country nor anything to stop
manipulation of election process, neither you did say a word about the so
called opposition which you guys have under investigation for money laundering
and illegal arms trade. Now let people see more of your secret stuff along with
the docs you obtain from your informers at Commonwealth of Independent States
in Minsk,” the hacktivist group taunted.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Jesper Larsen can be reached at [email protected]
