The hacker collective Anonymous announced "Operation Free Condor" in a YouTube video to protest the Ecuadorian government's policies against freedom of expression, reported the newspaper El Universo.
The Anonymous collective, a civil disobedience organization, sabotages official websites to protest restrictions against freedom of expression.
On the evening of Aug. 8, Anonymous sabotaged the Guayaquil city homepage. The site remains down at this writing. In its place, the hackers placed links to a database with information about 45,000 police officers and a YouTube video threatening future attacks in Ecuador in defense of freedom of expression. Guayaquil is Ecuador's second largest city.
According to the video, President Rafael Correa's actions against the El Universo newspaper's journalists and his policies to control the country's media motivated the attack.
Before the Guayaquil attack, Anonymous hacked the homepage of another website, in Francisco de Orellana in eastern Ecuador, replacing it with the banner "We are Anonymous, we are legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget, we're coming," reported Fundamedios on Aug. 4.
Ecuador's secretary of Communications told the news agency AFP that the database only listed names and identification numbers of police officers, information that could have been easily obtained. Minister of Telecommunications Jaime Guerrero said that the Ecuadorian government was working with a group of Korean experts to protect government websites from future cyber attacks, reported El Universo.
