The online hacking group known as Anonymous can be amusing at times, and occasionally even admirable, but most of the time it’s just annoyingly immature, and it’s most-recent hack definitely puts it into the latter category. For no reason other than because it though it would be funny, Anonymous decided to hack into the European Space Agency and release information on some of its officials online. While it’s fair to say the agency shouldn’t have allowed its database to be so easily breached, that’s no reason for the group to be causing problems for an organization that has far more important things to be doing than cleaning up what’s essentially a childish cyber-prank.
After a series of high-profile attacks on targets potentially worth attacking — ISIS, the KKK and Donald Trump — Anonymous, the online hacking collective, reaffirmed its commitment to chaos this weekend when it broke into the database of the European Space Agency and released names, emails and passwords of officials online. There’s no particular reason to think the hack put anyone at risk, but it represents an inconvenience for an agency that has better things to do than field calls from hacker aspirants (think: TK). What could have possessed them to go after a target so seemingly undeserving compared to their other recent marks? According to HackRead, a ‘representative’ of Anonymous declared: “BECAUSE XMAS IS COMING AND WE HAD TO DO SOMETHING FOR FUN SO WE DID IT FOR THE LULZ.” In other words, the group hacked into the international space association that is currently preparing to send the first Briton ever to the ISS for a variety of shits and giggles. In a sense, the hack still represents a sort of punishment: The group apparently took no time breaking into the agency’s poorly protected database. Using a blind SQL vulnerability on the group’s website, the hackers were able to get access to just about everything. One imagines they could have done worse than release some contacts.
