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Mosman Council Website copied by Anonymous

Wget would have worked nearly as well

Australian democracy stubbornly fails to teeter on the brink of collapse this morning, after a bunch of script-kiddies mistakenly published a backup copy of a public Website in the delusional belief that they’d achieved yet another stunning coup in the “anti-sec” campaign.

Anonymous’s self-aggrandizing but ultimately risible boast was “A wild leak appears: for a change, we sail to Australia this time.” The haul: a MySQL dump that replicated the entire public content of the local Mosman Council, with some hashed admin passwords and a prototype of a new site thrown in for free.

The Mosman Council Website isn’t even down. The garbage isn’t piling up in the streets, the north shore matrons aren’t protesting that a Porsche Cayenne can’t make it over unfilled potholes, the rates won’t go uncollected, and we didn’t even get the routine warning for citizens to change their passwords on other sites.

Mosman Council? What a target. What a hit. What a coup.

Usually-breathless mainstream outlets have had a hard time trying to hype this one up. Even describing the target as a “victim” sounds overblown, like describing someone with a hangover as a “victim”.

It’s a plunge into trivia given significance only by journalists unfamiliar with Australia, who take the Twitter boast at face value and call the target an “Australian government” website. You may as well hack the parish of Winterbourne Bassett and call it Her Majesty’s government.

The upside is the wasted effort. The script kiddies spent time and effort getting a trophy they could wave around; the rest of us could have obtained nearly as much with wget. ®

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