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CHILE is on alert after a massive hacking of the armed forces’ servers in an operation in which around 400,000 e-mails were stolen from the security agency.
The leak of the emails has caused the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces (EMCO), Guillermo Paiva, to tender his resignation to the Minister of Defense, Maya Fernandez.
Fernandez had to make an emergency trip from New York where she was together with President Gabriel Boric, who was attending the UN Climate Change conference.
The Ministry of National Defense referred to the hack in a statement on Wednesday night, September 21, calling it a “security breach of Joint Chiefs of Staff emails.”
“The government has ordered an administrative inquiry to determine the corresponding responsibilities. Additionally, the background information has been made available to the military justice system to initiate a criminal investigation,” adds the Chilean government’s communiqué.
According to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, the information was disseminated on platforms that disseminate electronic piracy, such as the page known as “Enlace Hacktivista.”
What is inside the information leaked by the massive hack?
The leaked documents would cover some five years of activities of the Chilean armed forces, including events related to the massive protests of 2019.
Some of the leaked emails indicate that the Chilean left would have orchestrated the social outburst and demonstrations of 2019. Other emails also point to the involvement of the Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, with several actors of the Chilean left-wing parties.
Within the leaked information there are from press reports to birthday calendars, schedules and food reports. According to the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIPER) there are also “documents labeled as ‘reserved’, ‘secret’ and ‘top secret,’ from sensitive areas of defense, such as cybersecurity strategy, the monitoring system of satellite communications at the borders and programs to store intelligence databases.”
The leaks expose data such as “software, suppliers, operation of the systems, description of the equipment and the identification of the officials in charge of the programs,” among the topics strictly related to national security, information such as the quotations for the satellite communications monitoring service was leaked.
Among the documents with the top-secret classification, information was leaked, such as the Army, Air Force and Navy intelligence directorates to carry out military exercises.
In total, more than 400,000 messages sent and received by 162 EMCO accounts between the years 2012 to May 2022 were exposed, although most of the information is from 2018. The weight of the information totals 340 gigabytes. The file metadata indicates that the hack occurred between May 7 and 16.
The massive hacking has leaked top-secret classified information from the Chilean army (EFE).
In a public message, the group responsible for the hacking, known as Guacamaya, announced that this would be the first step of an intervention against what it called “repressive forces,” referring to the public forces of several countries. This group, which traditionally discloses sensitive information of large mining companies, claims to have up to 10 terabytes of the police and armies of Peru, Mexico, Colombia and El Salvador.
The self-styled hacktivist group is an anarchist organization that rejects the concept of Nation-State, capitalism and refuses to call Latin America as such and instead prefers to call it by the name “Abya Yala,” a phrase of the Guna tribe of Panama and Colombia, which means “Ripe Land;” for some historians related to the indigenist movement the phrase is the first name given to the American continent.
Economist, writer and liberal. With a focus on finance, the war on drugs, history, and geopolitics // Economista, escritor y liberal. Con enfoque en finanzas, guerra contra las drogas, historia y geopolítica