Anonymous goes after Syria

HACKTIVIST GROUP Anonymous has gone after Syria's president and managed to hack into his email account.

Many hours might have gone into the hacking, we don't know. We do know that the hackers eventually broke through strong defences, a 12345 password, to gain access to president Bashar al-Assad's emails.

The same tactic was used to break into almost sixty other accounts, although in some cases the cipher needed a '6' on the end, making it the harder-to-crack 123456.

Anonymous, posting as Lulzfinancial, put the logins on Pastebin, the increasingly popular document sharing web site.

A separate statement from Anonymous places the activity under the banner of Opsyria, which is a movement working to stop government abuse of citizens in that country.

"For the third night in a row, Anonymous has set it's sights on the Syrian Government, in an operation dubbed #OpSyria. The Syrian government has never been shy at using force against it's own people. Intense tyranny and oppression have been going on for decades now inside Syria," it said.

"The Syrian people have had enough and now this government has a revolution on it's hands. The murders of innocent citizens by this regime have been ongoing. Anonymous has attacked Syrian Government servers and websites as a sign of solidarity with the Syrian people. More websites will follow. We will only stop when Bashar Assad steps down."

Emails from the government have been posted online, again to Pastebin, and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published a number of translations, two sets of PDFs that are here and here.

These include the suggestion that Assad should sit for an interview with television journalist Barbara Walters, because the "American psyche can be easily manipulated". µ