Operation World Cup

Overview

Operation World Cup is a cyber attack campaign orchestrated by members of the hacking group Anonymous in protest of the Brazilian government spending public funds on the 2014 FIFA World Cup rather than diverting resources to poorer parts of the country. The campaign resulted in the outage or security breach of dozens of Brazilian government websites.

Background

On May 30th, 2014, Reuters^[1] reported that Anonymous was preparing a cyber-attack on corporate sponsors of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil to protest spending resources on soccer games while parts of the country live in abject poverty. According to a hacker using the alias Che Commodore, hacking targets included Adidas, Emirates airlines, Coca-Cola and Budweiser. The article also reported that 333 documents had been extracted from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry's computing network by a hacker known as AnonManifest, which included a briefing for talks with United States Vice President Joe Biden and a list of sport ministers planning to attend the World Cup.

Notable Developments

Cyber Security Report

On June 2nd, 2014, the technology company Symantec^[2] published a "Latin American + Caribbean Cyber Security Trends" report, which outlined several potential World Cup security vulnerabilities and noted that Anonymous had threatened attacks against FIFA websites, corporate sponsors and the Brazilian government.

Anonymous Videos

On June 3rd, the AnonBRNews YouTube channel uploaded a video titled "#OpHackingCup – Let the Games Begin," which criticized the Brazilian government using public funds to build and reform soccer stadiums for the World Cup (shown below, left). On June 10th, the Vimeo channel @AnonymousVideo uploaded a video titled "#OpMundial2014," announcing plans to attack Brazilian government websites for creating "a system which ensures the poor remain poor and the wealthy remain wealthy" (shown below, right).

Cyber Attacks

On June 11th, a Pastebin^[3] page was created for updates on activities related to the operation, which listed several Brazilian government websites that had been targeted with DDoS attacks. On June 12th, the Hackers News Bulletin Twitter feed posted a list of websites that had been targeted in the operation.

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites reported on the #OpWorldCup cyber attacks, including International Business Times,^[4] Financial Times,^[5] Reuters,^[6] Mashable,^[7] ZDNet,^[8] RT^[9] and Motherboard.^[10]

Search Interest

External References