Another day, another entity that gets hacked and their data dumped because they ignored warnings, it seems. But for reasons that are unclear to me, Softpedia seems to be making a low-level breach sound like something much more than it appears to be.
Bogdan Popa reports:
The official website of the Argentinian Ministry of Industry (Ministerio de Produccion) suffered a major breach that exposed not only private documents but also personal information and contact details of a big number of individuals.
The website, produccion.gob.ar, was hacked by Kapustkiy and Kasimierz L,. who managed to breach it after getting access to an administrator account.
Softpedia was provided with evidence that access to the admin panel was indeed obtained, which in its turn offered access to personal information of employees and documents belonging to the ministry which weren’t otherwise supposed to be exposed.
We can confirm that details such as names, home addresses, emails, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and phone numbers were accessed as part of the breach and Kapustkiy told us that he estimates that approximately 18,000 accounts were exposed.
Read more on Softpedia.
DataBreaches.net was also given access to the data, and respectfully disagrees with Softpedia’s characterization of it. While there may be some email addresses that are used for both personal and professional purposes, the vast bulk of the data and files I reviewed appear to be nonpersonal government records dealing with projects. In some cases, such as one spreadsheet that Softpedia alludes to, the records included contact information for the entities as well as individual representatives of the entities. That spreadsheet also includes web site, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, but all the ones I looked at were organizational sites and accounts. In other words: these did not appear to be employees’ personal information at all. Perhaps Softpedia was given additional files that I was not provided, or perhaps my Spanish is totally failing me, but I’m somewhat skeptical about Softpedia’s description of the data. I don’t see any kind of “major breach” involving employee personal information.
That said, why oh why aren’t entities securing their sites better, and why don’t they respond when someone tries to alert them to a problem? This was not an SQLi attack, according to Kapustkiy, but by the same token, he states he would not have leaked the data if they had responded to his attempt to get them to address the security issue he had identified.
The ministry did not respond to an inquiry about the incident as of the time of publication.
Update: Although this site has not received a reply, Kapustkiy informs DataBreaches.net that the ministry has taken down the administration panel and blocked access from IP ranges outside the country. He also showed this site an email he received from them.
So the upshot is that the site will secure its information better, which is a good thing.