“Anonymous” may attack World Cup 2014 sponsors

As it’s not enough for Brazil 2014 world cup organizers. In addition to the civilians protests against the local government for spending around $11.5 billion on an eight weeks football (soccer) tournament, now the worldwide hacktivists group ‘Anonymous’ has announced that they are planning to initiate dedicated DDOS attacks against World Cup 2014 corporate partners websites.

“We have already conducted late-night tests to see which of the sites are more vulnerable," said the hacker who operates under the alias of Che Commodore, an Anonymous leading hacktivist. "We have a plan of attack, this time we are targeting the sponsors of the World Cup," he said in a Skype conversation with Reuters from an undisclosed location in Brazil. These sponsors have been written up on a hit list and include major corporations such as Coca Cola, Budweiser, Emirates Airlines and Adidas.

This is not the first action to be taken by Anonymous as part of their protests against the Brazilian government extravagant policy. Early last week, in what could be the biggest cyber-security breach since the US National Security Agency allegedly spied on President Dilma Rousseff's personal communications, Anonymous posted over 300 documents extracted from the Foreign Ministry's computing network. They include a briefing of talks between Brazilian officials and US Vice President Joe Biden during a visit to Brazil in May 2013 and a list of sport ministers that plan to attend the World Cup. A hacker known as “AnonManifest” used a phishing attack to break into the Foreign Ministry's databases and eventually access its documentation system, Che Commodore told Reuters - "Until yesterday afternoon the hacker still had access to the system," he said. As a result, the Foreign Ministry closed down its email system after the attack and instructed its 3,000 email account holders to change their passwords. Federal police is still investigating the breach. A Foreign Ministry official told Reuters last week that only 55 email accounts were hacked and the only documents that were obtained where attached to emails and from the ministry's internal document archive. "The problem has been resolved. Nothing important was leaked," said the official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. However, Brazilian diplomats abroad were left without email communications with their headquarters for several days.

Anonymous international hacktivists group does not stop in Brazil. Few days ago, another leader of the group, “AN0N AL AQSA”, has announced that yet another Cyber-Attack would be initiated against vast amount of Israeli financial institutions and other organizations as part of the few years old “#Op Israel” group. According to ‘AN0N’, the attack would be initiated on two different dates: June 7^th & June 20^th. The attacks methods that will be in use are DDOS, defacements, leak databases, hacking to Israeli websites and more. In order to gather all hacktivists worldwide, Anonymous created Facebook events calling all members to get together and unite for one purpose – take action against social justice and free Palestine. This new planned attack named ‘OpIsrael Reloaded V2’ and have over 500 attendees approved their participant in the attack. “We will strike any and all websites that we deem to be in Israeli Cyberspace in retaliation for the mistreating of people in Gaza and other areas. Anonymous has been watching you, and you have received fair warning of our intent to seize control of your cyberspace in accordance with basic humanitarian rights of free speech and the right to live”, written in one of the events.

Read more at: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/31/anonymous-cyber-attack-world-cup-brazil_n_5423337.html 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/world-cup-2014-hacktivist-group-anonymous-plan-cyberattack-on-world-cup-sponsors-9467786.html