RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Sunday, November 15th, municipal elections day throughout Brazil, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) faced a new problem. Despite announcing during the week that it had not been the target of a virtual attack, hackers leaked a wealth of internal Court data to demonstrate its vulnerability.
The leak was exposed by a group calling itself the CyberTeam. According to them, the data exposure does not necessarily have a political message, and is only a means to disprove the court which asserts it did not suffer an attack, and maintain that the Brazilian state’s investments in cyber security are not achieving the expected results.
According to the CyberTeam, the vulnerability they used to hack into the TSE systems remains open, so it is still possible to access the court’s database. The perpetrators say they noticed a firewall change after the first attack and the public statement that there had been no cyber attack, but access to the systems remains possible.
“The TSE’s security was compromised soon after it was announced that security had been enhanced due to the attack on the STJ and other areas of the Ministry of Justice. This only proves that the government’s spending millions has served no purpose,” says the group.
The data released show the TSE’s database structure, but does not expose citizen data. However, they expose a range of credentials for access to the court systems in seven TXT files.
In addition to the TSE, the attack also impacts the systems of other organizations linked to it, such as the Regional Electoral Courts (TRE), which operate at the state level.
Despite the attack on the TSE, the CyberTeam says it has nothing to do with other more serious attacks that have recently affected the judiciary. More specifically, they say they are not involved with the ransomware that temporarily suspended activities of the Federal Superior Court (STJ), Brazil’s second-highest court.