SANTIAGO – A spy software was discovered by Chile’s judicial power system, in which they consider an attempt to extract mass data. The Administrative Corporation of the Judicial Power presented the denouncement, as important information could be at stake. Perpetrators haven’t been discovered yet.
Chile’s judicial power has been tracking what they consider an international cyber spying crime, in which unknown servers have accessed the institution’s platform and extract mass data. The institution has declared that different IP directions have targeted its database, presumably with the aim of obtaining information about legal procedures.
Civilian and penal platforms, as well as the Supreme Court have been exposed, as different data requests were made throughout softwares from Microsoft, and Amazon.com. The irregularity was observed not only from abroad, but also from national companies like VTR Banda Ancha (Broadband), GTD Internet and even Movistar. However, perpetrators and their motivation haven’t been found so far, as declared the Radio Bío Bío Chile’s investigation Unit.
International attack
The background recorded by the Judicial Power so far, is considered enough to set the denouncement for international cyber spying. According to the Administrative Corporation of the Judicial Power CAPJ (Spanish acronym), efforts to block the origin of the attacks have been made. But the result was just a temporary cease of the malware softwares operations. Those programs were used to automate the manual searching engines, thus cheating the login limit that a user can reach in the system.
Another program was used to modify the judicial query parameters, allowing multiple connections and other negative effects that slow down the whole country’s system. Besides, the attack implies an extra spending of money for the institution, as it has to provide a budget for the acquisition of new security platform equipment.
Informatics experts like Javier Godoy, an informatics engineer who is currently working at the USA in the branch of electronic comerce, consider that the institution isn’t under a cyber-attack. Godoy, who works in USA in the branch of electronics marketing, assured that technically “We shouldn’t talk about cyber spying when the information is put to public access, just as happens in many sites, including the Judicial Power”
Carlos Oliva, an independent software developer and member of the consulting company Sigma 5, remarked that it must be a case of “scraping”. That is a technique used to systematically obtain data from a determined web page, by using a program that simulates to be a common user, through a common browser.
Oliva explained that the solution for the scraping would be the implementation of the “recaptcha”. The program is able to establish a difference between a human and a program, showing up a pad filled with 12 images about some specific topic. Then, the recaptcha asks the user to identify images that belong the same category. That way, it avoids scrapper programs to extract mass information.
