The Finnish arm of the hacktivist collective Anonymous has issued a statement claiming responsibility for exposing 16,000 people living in Finland, including a parliamentary aid's affiliation to an active neo-Nazi group, in what it claims was a move to embarrass the Finnish government into improving its weak data security.
The list published on Pastebin includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of the Finnish residents. It appears to have come from several different sources. The list also includes upper secondary vocational institutes, civil servants and police officers.
Also included were the names that came from the membership application database of the Kansallinen Vastarinta website. "We have successfully and easily hacked [the neo-Nazi] website and published the database of its membership application database containing personal data of some applicants from all around the country," reads a statement released on Pastebin. "We strongly recommend and invite you to check it out. You may find out your neighbour or best friend is a dumbass Neo-Nazi."
Ulla Pyysalo, a parliamentary aid who worked for True Finns MP Juho Eerola, said she would resign after her name appeared on the list that Anonymous published on Pastebin last week.
The hacker collective also hinted at further releases of information. "We published the info of 16,000 people, yet do you think every hacker announces everything they have hacked? We certainly have not, as we sit on a larger amount of info that have been leaked." They also issued a strong statement to the neo-Nazi website: "We demand SVK to cease its social and net activities and dissolve immediately. Should it not happen, we will continue to carry out attacks to its website in the form we will find more appropriate for our intentions."
The group hit the news one again late last month after publishing the personal details of Boston's police officers and other law enforcement personnel in response to the mass arrests and brutality at the Occupy Boston protests on October 1. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation on the matter.