The Binary Guardians affected the e-Government portal during the campaign on August 7, 2017
On August 7, 2017, the Gobierno en línea portal was named by EFE/El Pitazo and appears with the exact domain gobiernoenlinea.gob.ve on IT Projects’ technical list. The BBC also linked to the Venezuelan government site in its coverage of the attack. There is no public evidence of data exfiltration.
Overview
Missing evidence
Impact details
Gobierno en línea was listed by EFE/El Pitazo/IT Projects as affected in The Binary Guardians campaign. No data exposure or internal compromise was reported.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Information content security
- Subtype
- website defacement or dns redirection
- Confidence
- High
Public Cobertura links the target to “The Binary Guardians” campaign involving website defacement and redirects. No source confirms data theft or internal system compromise in the case of this specific target.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Degraded (non-critical)
- Information impact
- Integrity loss
- Affected scope
- Single system
- Critical service
- Potential
- Public confidence
- Limited
- Recoverability
- Regular
Website defacement/redirection in a public campaign; no confirmed data exposure, internal compromise, or prolonged service outage for the individual target.
Timeline
The Binary Guardians compromised the public portal of Venezuela's Online Government Portal as part of a defacement/redirect campaign targeting .ve domains.
The group spreads the message "Our struggle is digital" and expresses support for Operation David; sources at Reuters/IBTimes indicate that it was not part of the military operation.
Media outlets and technical sources publish lists of affected sites, with varying scopes: at least 25, more than 30, and about 40 websites.