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Foreign government emails HACKED says TeamP0ison

But something’s strange here…

TeamP0ison has lobbed a file on Pastebin which purports to be a few hundred e-mail accounts complete with passwords.

Or so it seems, for the first 23 accounts in the list, which cover addresses from the UK’s Ministry of Defense, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the money-movement watcher Austrac, IP Australia, Liverpool Council, and the Fijian government.

After that, the scoop starts to seem a little less scoopy: the remaining 170, the dumb drop suggests, nearly all have the user’s first name as password and last name as username.

Somehow, that doesn’t ring true. While I’m willing to accept that not all MPs in Australia’s federal parliament are too smart to use a name as a password, I’m pretty sure the parliamentary system – which is under pretty constant tapping at least, to see if there’s a door left open somewhere – would enforce more rigorous passwords.

From that point of view, Hex00010’s paste looks as much a cock-up as a hack.

However, if (say) Wayne Swan wants to take a look at Senator George Brandis’ email, TeamP0ison apparently reckons Brandis is the username and George the password.

You just can't get the staff, these days. ®

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