Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Anonymous Finland: 10% of Finnish email accounts nationwide compromised

Cory Doctorow at 9:23 am Tue, Nov 15, 2011

— FEATURED —

Science

Making sense of the confusing Supreme Court DNA patent ruling

Book Review

The 'Geisters: spooky, scary novel

Science

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

Feature

The Snowden Principle

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle

"Anonymous Finland" claims it has compromised the email logins and passwords of 500,000 Finns -- about ten percent of the country's population.

Among the hacked emails are allegedly accounts belonging to journalists at Finland's mainstream daily Helsingin Sanomat, members of the Finnish parliament, police officials, Helsinki city councillors and students and faculties at several of the country's universities.

The hackers said they had taken advantage of security loopholes in company computer systems storing email addresses and passwords.

Anonymous Finland has also launched a campaign against the rightwing extremist Finnish Resistance Movement, leaking a list of its membership applications on October 31.

And on Monday, the group announced it was launching a series of cyber attacks against Finnish mining company Talvivaara, alleging its mining activities in Sotkamo in eastern Finland are conducted to "the detriment of the local natural environment and people of the communities".

Finland facing large-scale hacking attacks: police

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE:  anonymous • finland • politics • privacy • security • web theory

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • Kieran Manners

    So how much longer will BB fete Anonymous as some kind of wonderful glittering positive force in internet culture?

    • gjtorikian

      U mad, bro? Or can you just not read?

      This was literally the most objective post made by BoingBoing on Anonymous. It’s an intro text written by Corey: ”Anonymous Finland” claims it has compromised the email logins and passwords of 500,000 Finns — about ten percent of the country’s population.”

      And the rest is a block quote. From a newspaper. Absolutely **no* feting!

  • KalleVirtanen

    As a finn – I have to say that most likely there´s some group of people who just wanted to take advantage of this whole anonymous-hype. Finland is such a small place that if you just make a poor statement and post it to some place – you will get a lot of media attention.

    This extermist thing on the other hand might have been made by some skillful group as a targeted attack, but as far as I have understood – this bigger one was just a big flush of identities – not passwords per se. Some has used them for scamming online resellers but I personally don´t consider it as dangerous. You could get the same info by checking out hundreds of facebook accounts.

    Other than that – this mining company statement is much more likely another person or a small group that are just playing tricks. As I mentioned – I could do the same to the goverment and would produce a huge media-pandemonium.

  • Ben Burger

    okay… why did they hack 10% of Finland’s email addresses? Just for fun or what?