This Sunday (30), when legislative elections are held in Portugal, hackers claimed to have invaded the country’s Parliament system and stolen sensitive information. Local police are investigating the case, but there has been no official confirmation of the attack.
The action was claimed by Lapsus$ Group, the same group that claimed responsibility for an attack on the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the ConectSUS app in December 2021, when the two platforms went offline.
The group has been accumulating possible attacks in Portugal. On January 2, Lapsus$ claimed responsibility for a major offensive against the biggest media conglomerate in Portugal: Impresa. Websites linked to the company were offline, including the pages of the broadcaster SIC, audience leader on Portuguese open TV, and the newspaper Expresso, the country’s most read weekly.
The authors of the hacker attack accessed the media group’s internal system, compromising communication between employees and the operation of tools used for the production of television programs and managed to take down Opto, the streaming platform.
In a message posted online on Sunday, Lapsus$ said it had obtained “sensitive government-related content, politicians’ personal information, political party documents, email settings and passwords,” as well as other data.
The criminals put the proceeds of the alleged attack up for sale. The required payment method is bitcoin cryptocurrency. The hackers also took the opportunity to brag about previous attacks, including attacks “on ministries in Brazil”.
According to a report by the newspaper Expresso – which is part of the group attacked by the hackers at the beginning of the month –, the website of the Parliament of Portugal was down for five minutes.
The Judiciary Police of Portugal is investigating the case. To the Portuguese newspaper Público, a source from the corporation said that it is still too early to confirm if there was an invasion. “There is a claim that there was an attack, but we do not know that it took place and, if so, what the extent and modality are.”​
The same source also said that attacks can happen to withhold, sell or destroy information, and that it will take a lot of investigation to know for sure what happened.
The Assembly of the Republic did not respond to the contact made by the leaf. To the Lusa news agency, João Leal, director of the Communications area, said that Parliament is investigating the possible hacker attack, but that there is no evidence, for now, that it has occurred.
The episode was released this Sunday afternoon, when Portugal holds early elections to choose the new composition of Parliament. The election was scheduled after the dissolution of Parliament in November, caused by the impossibility of reaching an agreement on the national budget for 2022.
The election campaign ended with a technical tie between the two largest parties, the Socialist Party, which has ruled the country since 2015, and the centre-right PSD (Social Democratic Party). Socialist António Costa, current prime minister and virtual candidate to remain in office, has seen his favoritism progressively diminish in recent weeks.
Source: Folha
