According to the president of Mexico, a group of hackers stole a sizable chunk of emails from the Mexican Defense Department as well as those from police and military organizations in other Latin American nations.
Lopez Obrador, often known as AMLO, has dismissed worries about the growing militarization of public security, claiming that in order to avoid corruption, the guard must now be under military direction. Speaking at a press conference, the president verified allegations about his own health issues and confirmed that the information from the Defense Ministry hack that had been reported in local media overnight was accurate.
Media reports claim that the hacker gained access to six terabytes of material from the Defense Ministry, including transcripts of communications, details about criminal characters, and surveillance of Ken Salazar, the American ambassador to Mexico.
The hack was minimized by López Obrador, who claimed that "nothing is uncertain." He claimed that the attack appeared to have happened during a system change at the Defense Department.
However, Chile was so concerned about the intrusion into its own systems that last week, while being in the United States with President Gabriel Boric for the UN General Assembly, it called the defense minister back.
Emails from the militaries of El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, and the National Police of El Salvador are also included in the 10 gigabytes of data that the organization has taken. The majority of the data seemed to come from Mexico.
Anonymous social justice activists going by the name Guacamaya claim to employ hacking to expose wrongdoing and corruption on behalf of Indigenous people. The emails of a mining corporation long suspected of violating human rights and the environment in Guatemala were previously breached and made public by hackers with the same identity.
The group lamented the colonists' pillage of Latin America, which it refers to as Abya Yala, in a statement that accompanied the most recent action, as well as the 'Global North's ' ongoing extractivist objectives.
Data theft method
In a statement, the hacking group said that governments in Latin American nations utilize their militaries and police forces to 'hold their inhabitant's prisoners,' frequently after receiving intensive training from the United States. Although the group promised to make the records available to journalists, so far only a small portion has been publicized, possibly due to the overwhelming amount of material.
The hackers claimed in an email exchange that their analysis of the Mexico emails up to that point revealed that a lot of the information had been widely known and that they didn't believe there were any destructive emails, potentially because more private exchanges were better secured. However, they claimed there was proof the military was paying close attention to political and social movements.
In addition to the Zapatista rebel movement, which managed an uprising in southern Mexico in 1994, and groups contrary to López Obrador's current effort to build a tourist train around the Yucatan Peninsula, they claimed that those included relatives of 43 students who were kidnapped by local police and allegedly given over to be killed by a drug gang in 2014.
Guacamaya appears to be more of a 'hacktivist' hack-and-leak operation with social justice objectives rather than a cyberattack targeting government information systems for financial gain or extortion.
The details of the leak were first revealed by Mexican journalist and well-known government critic Carlos Loret, who claimed that the data collected from the ministry demonstrated the extent of the military's power under Lopez Obrador, who has given the military responsibility for everything from infrastructure development to customs supervision.
In spite of criticism of alleged military abuses and worries that the government is militarizing public security, lawmakers adopted legislation this month expanding the role of the armed forces in combating crime.
