A new actor has joined the "Paro Nacional" in Colombia and is actually very known worldwide. Beside the citizens, government or even the president, there is a new actor that wants to take revenge and defend the citizens and human rights, because of that it is making attacks against governmental institutions. As a clue, I can tell that it is really related to the cybersecurity, and it is Anonymous.
First of all in order to understand the current situation is necessary to ask ourselves, what does it means cybersecurity?. "Cybersecurity is the art of protecting networks, devices and data from unauthorized access or criminal use and the practice of ensuring confidentiality, integrity and availability of information" (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, 2019). Taking that information into account, now is possible to understand the gravity of the situation, understanding that cybersecurity is a priority for the nation safety.
Anyways, the important task is to understand who is Anonymous and why he did all those attacks to governmental institutions? Anonymous is a group of hackers that has lots of activists members around the world and it is widely known by their cyber attacks against different governmental institutions, governmental agencies, church, corporations, etc.
Image taken from google.
Regarding the attacks against the Colombian institutions, all of them have occurred the last week attacking the official webpages of the: Senate, Army and last but not least the presidential webpage. Anonymous wanted to show that the current situation is critical and because of that they used a special technique to shut down those institutional websites and is known as "Denial of service or DDs in which they use pages anchored in servers all over the world, which multiply by 10 thousand, 100 thousand or even millions of simultaneous entries to a certain web address" (Semana, 2021) but beside the political issues, those sites are of high importance because they have the oficial government balance of the positive cases and tendencies of Covid-19 in the country and lots more confidential and of high importance information.
Beside the shut down of the sites Anonymous took confidential information like data and mails of some members the Colombian Army because of the Tax reform and the bad response of the government during the pandemic. The main reason that they have committed those actions is because they will not allow that the attention be diverted from the systematic violations of the human rights with the current situation here in Colombia where we have lived with lots of violence, deaths and the police force lately.
It seems that sometimes outside/international actors take care of the national issues more than the nationals at the end, but the situation by now not shows a soon end because everything looks with lots of uncertainty. It is a disturbance situation and it shows that Colombia is not prepared for a cyber attack because the facts speak by themselves, but at the same time this actions demonstrate that Colombia's current situation now has international importance and human rights have to be respected.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA. (2019, November 14). Security Tip (ST04-001). Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA. https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-001.
Semana. (2021, May 5). Anonymous tumbó las páginas web del Senado y la Presidencia de Colombia. Semana.com Últimas Noticias de Colombia y el Mundo. https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/anonymous-tumbo-las-paginas-web-del-senado-y-la-presidencia-de-colombia/202117/.
Comments
Post a Comment