The Unknowns – security rather than political activists?
On 6 April this year, new hacker group ‘The Unknowns’ announced itself with the release of data from a range of victims – including, for example, http://www.customs.gov.ph/, http://www.ghanalap.gov.gh/ and http://www.dbios.org/. “Do not worry,” said The Unknowns, “the shared information cannot be used to harm you or your website.”
Just under a month later, on 1 May, they made their second announcement, and listed a new set of victims – this time more high-profile:
- NASA – Glenn Research Center
- US military
- US AIR FORCE
- European Space Agency
- Thai Royal Navy
- Harvard
- Renault Company
- French ministry of Defense
- Bahrain Ministry of Defense
- Jordanian Yellow Pages
The message included, “we have released some of your documents and data, we probably harmed you a bit but that’s not really our goal…”
Now, in their third message on Friday (4 May), The Unknowns have explained themselves more fully:
We are a new hacker group, we have never been in any hacking team before. We are not Anonymous Version 2 and we are not against the US Government.
We can’t call ourselves White Hat Hackers but we’re not Black Hat Hackers either…
Now, we decided to hack these sites for a reason…
The reason is that security is weak, and The Unknowns profess to want to change things.
We don’t want revolutions, we don’t want chaos, we just want to protect the people out there.
Websites are not secured, people are not secured, computers are not secured, nothing is…
We’re here to help and we’re asking nothing in exchange.
Now, concludes, the group, it has succeeded with these victims:
And now, we are happy to inform you that most of the links we used to penetrate threw the databases, have been patched. This is exactly what we where looking for. This is what we want.
It’s an interesting concept – more like old-style hacking with a conscience rather than new-style cracking for a profit. Perhaps we have two groups now: Anonymous, the political activists; and The Unknowns, the security activists?
