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Updated, 19.55
FINE GAEL has emailed visitors to its website, advising them that their personal details were accessed, and may have been copied, by the Anonymous ‘hacktivist’ group that breached its site last night.
The party’s new website - launched just last Tuesday – was last night breached by two members of the collective, who manipulated the site’s commenting feature into displaying an Anonymous-branded holding page telling users that Fine Gael had “taken no measures to protect you”.
The FBI has been called in to investigate the breach by the US hosting firm ElectionMail, which hosted the site.
This morning, as the Data Protection Commissioner indicated he was investigating the breach, the party wrote to the website’s visitors – who were invited to give their names, email addresses, constituency details and phone numbers when they left comments – to inform them of the attack.
In an email seen by TheJournal.ie, the party said its site had been “professionally hacked” between the hours of 8pm and 12am last night.
The email read:
We were alerted this morning that the Anonymous Group was able to secure the database of the information submitted by you during the previous week…
As a result we have now taken the necessary action to report this “hacking crime” to the proper authorities including the Data Protection Commissioner and the Gardai.
This lunchtime the party said that around 2,000 users had seen their details – as well as their unique IP addresses – accessed; the Evening Herald had earlier reported that almost 4,000 comments have been left, but the Herald’s Kevin Doyle has since tweeted that a number of the comments were left by repeat visitors, thus reducing the overall number of persons affected.
Proving that Fine Gael had been selectively censoring messages submitted by users to the site, Anonymous provided Doyle with a copy of the data collected – data which included the details of Green Party TD Paul Gogarty, who had left a comment on the site.
The Herald also quotes a statement from Anonymous which describes Fine Gael as “a bunch of lying, deceitful men” and added that “all you people are interested in is your own back pocket”.
An online security analyst, who asked to remain unnamed, told TheJournal.ie that the attack was likely the work of what are called ‘script kiddies’, utilising a technique known as a ‘cross site scripting’ attack.
Such attacks, the analyst said, are “not terribly complicated” and are “usually easily defended against”.
At the time of writing, the website remained offline, with a holding page advising visitors that the site would remain unavailable “while we follow-up [sic] with the appropriate authorities to resolve this matter”.
The party’s traditional website, which had remained active at www.finegael.org while the temporary campaign website was active, has also been removed, and also redirects visitors to the notice about the Anonymous attack.
Overnight, the site had been taken down fully, and then replaced with a holding page assuring users that “the integrity of all the data collected” was “still intact, and was not accessed at any point by this outside entity”. Screengrabs of the site at various stages overnight have been posted on politics.ie and on the blog of Michele Neylon.
Anonymous is more widely known for its campaigns against the Church of Scientology, and more recently for having attacked the websites of companies like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal over those sites’ withdrawal of services to WikiLeaks.
Last week the site had come under further scrutiny when it was revealed that it was hosted in Miami, meaning that no political party in the Dáil had its main website hosted within Ireland.
The foreign-based hosting service had also raised concerns in the blogosphere about the Party’s compliance with the Data Protection Acts, and whether their transfer of personal data to a host outside of the EU was being done on a compliant legal basis
As a result, late last week the site was updated to include an opt-out where users could stop the party from retaining their details.
This afternoon Fine Gael senator Paschal Donohoe told RTÉ Radio’s News at One that the party “regretted” the security breach, but that the website had fallen victim to a “formidable” outside presence.
Donohoe said the website had been hosted in the United States “for reasons in relation to bandwidth access, and also cost”.
Additional reporting by Susan Ryan.
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I really hope they charge them, it’s the right road to take and might make other parents think twice about buying a gun for a 15 year old on black Friday!?! What a pair of human meat sacks…. They need to answer to the poor parents of the kids he killed. What a warped country.
@Dawn Harvey: they have been charged. It’s why they are in court.
@transik: a few teens hanging around on a street corner is the exact same as multiple school shootings every year alright.
The comments section for this article is open but the one below it about Prince Andrew is closed??
Are they not just as responsible as the leader who instigated the Capitol building riots? Leading to murdr
@Dean: “Are they not just as responsible as the leader who instigated the Capitol building riots? Leading to murdr”
Who was murdered at the Capitol riot?
@Dean: what murder?
If you start charging people over the actions of their children, where do you stop. And where’s the line. I just don’t see this case sticking at all. The fact they’re having a break in the case has all the signalling that this case won’t stand up. And I think that’s the right decision. Sure you can charge someone with not safety storing a weapon but this leap to murder is far too remote. This case is a knee jerk reaction by local authorities towards a grieving community.
@RogersRabbit: the father bought a gun for his 15-year old and knew about his intention to carry out a school massacre. That’s at least manslaughter, if not enticing to murder.
@RogersRabbit: the school asked the parents to remove the child from school and to bring him to a counsellor because of his concerning behaviour. They refused and left the child in school, without any support. They have at the very least neglected their own child big way, that’s criminally punishable
@RogersRabbit: michigan is one of the only, if not the only state in the USA that doesn’t require that a gun be stored under lock and key by law. However it is illegal for someone under the age of 18 to possess a handgun there and they bought it for him for his 16th birthday. Furthermore the mother told the kid not to get caught in future when the school reported that he was caught looking at amunition on his phone. I agree that it’s going to be tough to get the manslaughter charges to stick though. Which is a pity because his parents come across as s c u m. Hopefully they’ll get some sort of federal conviction so they are never able to own guns again.
@Sebastian Manka: that hasn’t been established. The father buying a gun and the parents being told teachers were concerned about him once or twice are two independent things.
@Daniela Monza: since when is not bringing your child to a counsellor criminally punishable. There’s a big diff between being a bad parent and one that should be in prison.
@RogersRabbit: they failed to secure their weapon as the law requires resulting in the commission of a crime. We don’t need further gun laws; we need the existing laws enforced.
Because he is 15 and the crimes he’s alleged to have committed are so serious. And at 15 he’s old enough to know what he did was wrong. Also the age at with serious crimes are been committed is dropping, and consideration is taken into account if this person poses a serious threat or is likely to reoffend.
Could someone explain why/how he is being tried as an adult please?
@Waylanderj: it is a legal option subject to a legal challenge pending his mental health evaluation. Setting an arbitrary age is not a standard across the US. Do you think a standard period is superior to an individual maturity assessment? His trial should he plead not guilty, will be informative.
have your say