During the General Assembly of the Dutch ‘Piratenpartij’ (PPNL), hackers penetrated the security of the party’s infrastructure. Some of the databases that were affected were the member administration system and the webmail. It is still not clear whether the intruders copied any data, changed files or compromised the party’s infrastructure in some other way.

In response to the discussion amongst members in PPNL, about whether the person responsible had honest intentions to address the party’s flawed security,  the informal leader of PPNL, Dirk Poot,  stated an email to the general mailinglist of the ‘Piratenpartij’:

If this had been the work of a benign person, they would not have vandalized anything, nor would they have stolen everything from the party.

Over the course of the past few weeks, several internal documents were allegedly leaked. Co-founder of the party, Samir Allioui, claims to have received a copy of these files via an anonymous email. It is unclear exactly how the IT department of ‘Piratenpartij’ has responded to these alleged leaks, but according to a source the party has not taken sufficient measures to prevent further security breaches.

Chairman Henk Heslinga and vice-chairman Wiel Maessen have posted a public statement on the website of the ‘Piratenpartij’ after the hacking incident, in which the party recommends users of the LDAP and email systems to change their passwords. A similar message was sent out via email to all the members of the party.

The party’s board is considering reporting the incident to the police. At the time of writing, there have been no claims of responsibility for the attack.

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During the General Assembly of the Dutch ‘Piratenpartij’ (PPNL), hackers penetrated the security of the party’s infrastructure. Some of the databases that were affected were the member administration system and the webmail….