Hacking Collective Says They Breached Istanbul Site, Eliminated Debts

Some might say a major hack like this belongs on my new crime blog, but in this instance, it's hard to see it as a crime. In the midst of continuing unrest in Turkey, where citizens have been protesting the religious, conservative government for weeks now, a group that calls itself the RedHack collective apparently took control of the Istanbul Special Provincial Administration (ioi.gov.tr) and then did something a lot of average citizens in any major city might initially find pretty damned awesome:

The hackers claim that, by penetrating the organization’s systems, they’ve been able to erase people's debts to water, gas, Internet, electricity, and telephone companies.

In addition, RedHack has published a username and a password to allow others to access the Istanbul Special Provincial Administration’s systems.

As noted by Softpedia, the site is now offline--either from traffic or more likely to minimize further damage from the hack.

You can read a good deal about RedHack on Pastebin, a popular programming site that simply allows users to paste and store text as needed. RedHack focuses on Turkish interests and they've been around, according to this post, since the late 1990s.

I've never blogged as much as I really wanted to about various international news stories for a variety of reasons. However anything going on in Turkey should really be of interest to Americans in general--it's a large, previously stable democracy with a Muslim majority. It bridges Europe and Asia.

So, just saying, maybe look up from the Candy Crush and pay attention sometimes, spanky.

(As I mentioned in this post, this entry is a step toward covering more non-crime news in this blog. Crime stuff will be posted to CrimeBlogX.blogspot.com.)

[Softpedia]